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1. Local Correlation Clustering with Asymmetric Classification Errors

   Jafarov, Jafar ; Kalhan, Sanchit ; Makarychev, Konstantin ; Makarychev, Yury ( January 2021 , International Conference on Machine Learning)

   null (Ed.)

   In the Correlation Clustering problem, we are given a complete weighted graph G with its edges labeled as “similar" and “dissimilar" by a noisy binary classifier. For a clustering C of graph G, a similar edge is in disagreement with C, if its endpoints belong to distinct clusters; and a dissimilar edge is in disagreement with C if its endpoints belong to the same cluster. The disagreements vector is a vector indexed by the vertices of G such that the v-th coordinate of the disagreements vector equals the weight of all disagreeing edges incident on v. The goal is to produce a clustering that minimizes the ℓp norm of the disagreements vector for p≥1. We study the ℓ_p objective in Correlation Clustering under the following assumption: Every similar edge has weight in [αw,w] and every dissimilar edge has weight at least αw (where α ≤ 1 and w > 0 is a scaling parameter). We give an O((1/α)^{1/2−1/(2p)} log 1/α) approximation algorithm for this problem. Furthermore, we show an almost matching convex programming integrality gap. 

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2. Local Correlation Clustering with Asymmetric Classification Errors

   Jafarov, Jafar ; Kalhan, Sanchit ; Makarychev, Konstantin ; Makarychev, Yury ( January 2021 , Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   Meila, Marina ; Zhang, Tong (Ed.)

   In the Correlation Clustering problem, we are given a complete weighted graph $G$ with its edges labeled as “similar" and “dissimilar" by a noisy binary classifier. For a clustering $\mathcal{C}$ of graph $G$, a similar edge is in disagreement with $\mathcal{C}$, if its endpoints belong to distinct clusters; and a dissimilar edge is in disagreement with $\mathcal{C}$ if its endpoints belong to the same cluster. The disagreements vector, $\mathbf{disagree}$, is a vector indexed by the vertices of $G$ such that the $v$-th coordinate $\mathbf{disagree}_v$ equals the weight of all disagreeing edges incident on $v$. The goal is to produce a clustering that minimizes the $\ell_p$ norm of the disagreements vector for $p\geq 1$. We study the $\ell_p$ objective in Correlation Clustering under the following assumption: Every similar edge has weight in $[\alpha\mathbf{w},\mathbf{w}]$ and every dissimilar edge has weight at least $\alpha\mathbf{w}$ (where $\alpha \leq 1$ and $\mathbf{w}>0$ is a scaling parameter). We give an $O\left((\frac{1}{\alpha})^{\frac{1}{2}-\frac{1}{2p}}\cdot \log\frac{1}{\alpha}\right)$ approximation algorithm for this problem. Furthermore, we show an almost matching convex programming integrality gap. 

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3. Correlation Clustering with Asymmetric Classification Errors

   Jafarov, Jafar ; Kalhan, Sanchit ; Makarychev, Konstantin ; Makarychev, Yury ( January 2020 , International Conference on Machine Learning)

   In the Correlation Clustering problem, we are given a weighted graph $G$ with its edges labelled as "similar" or "dissimilar" by a binary classifier. The goal is to produce a clustering that minimizes the weight of "disagreements": the sum of the weights of "similar" edges across clusters and "dissimilar" edges within clusters. We study the correlation clustering problem under the following assumption: Every "similar" edge $e$ has weight $w_e \in [ \alpha w, w ]$ and every "dissimilar" edge $e$ has weight $w_e \geq \alpha w$ (where $\alpha \leq 1$ and $w > 0$ is a scaling parameter). We give a $(3 + 2 \log_e (1/\alpha))$ approximation algorithm for this problem. This assumption captures well the scenario when classification errors are asymmetric. Additionally, we show an asymptotically matching Linear Programming integrality gap of $\Omega(\log 1/\alpha)$ 

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4. A Weighted Approach to the Maximum Cardinality Bipartite Matching Problem with Applications in Geometric Settings

   Lahn, Nathaniel ; Raghvendra, Sharath ( June 2019 , Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   We present a weighted approach to compute a maximum cardinality matching in an arbitrary bipartite graph. Our main result is a new algorithm that takes as input a weighted bipartite graph G(A cup B,E) with edge weights of 0 or 1. Let w <= n be an upper bound on the weight of any matching in G. Consider the subgraph induced by all the edges of G with a weight 0. Suppose every connected component in this subgraph has O(r) vertices and O(mr/n) edges. We present an algorithm to compute a maximum cardinality matching in G in O~(m(sqrt{w} + sqrt{r} + wr/n)) time. When all the edge weights are 1 (symmetrically when all weights are 0), our algorithm will be identical to the well-known Hopcroft-Karp (HK) algorithm, which runs in O(m sqrt{n}) time. However, if we can carefully assign weights of 0 and 1 on its edges such that both w and r are sub-linear in n and wr=O(n^{gamma}) for gamma < 3/2, then we can compute maximum cardinality matching in G in o(m sqrt{n}) time. Using our algorithm, we obtain a new O~(n^{4/3}/epsilon^4) time algorithm to compute an epsilon-approximate bottleneck matching of A,B subsetR^2 and an 1/(epsilon^{O(d)}}n^{1+(d-1)/(2d-1)}) poly log n time algorithm for computing epsilon-approximate bottleneck matching in d-dimensions. All previous algorithms take Omega(n^{3/2}) time. Given any graph G(A cup B,E) that has an easily computable balanced vertex separator for every subgraph G'(V',E') of size |V'|^{delta}, for delta in [1/2,1), we can apply our algorithm to compute a maximum matching in O~(mn^{delta/1+delta}) time improving upon the O(m sqrt{n}) time taken by the HK-Algorithm. 

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5. Evaluating Stability in Massive Social Networks: Efficient Streaming Algorithms for Structural Balance

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPICS.APPROX/RANDOM.2023.58  

   Ashvinkumar, Vikrant ; Assadi, Sepehr ; Deng, Chengyuan ; Gao, Jie ; Wang, Chen ( January 2023 , APPROX-RANDOM)

   Megow, Nicole ; Smith, Adam (Ed.)

   Structural balance theory studies stability in networks. Given a n-vertex complete graph G = (V,E) whose edges are labeled positive or negative, the graph is considered balanced if every triangle either consists of three positive edges (three mutual "friends"), or one positive edge and two negative edges (two "friends" with a common "enemy"). From a computational perspective, structural balance turns out to be a special case of correlation clustering with the number of clusters at most two. The two main algorithmic problems of interest are: (i) detecting whether a given graph is balanced, or (ii) finding a partition that approximates the frustration index, i.e., the minimum number of edge flips that turn the graph balanced. We study these problems in the streaming model where edges are given one by one and focus on memory efficiency. We provide randomized single-pass algorithms for: (i) determining whether an input graph is balanced with O(log n) memory, and (ii) finding a partition that induces a (1 + ε)-approximation to the frustration index with O(n ⋅ polylog(n)) memory. We further provide several new lower bounds, complementing different aspects of our algorithms such as the need for randomization or approximation. To obtain our main results, we develop a method using pseudorandom generators (PRGs) to sample edges between independently-chosen vertices in graph streaming. Furthermore, our algorithm that approximates the frustration index improves the running time of the state-of-the-art correlation clustering with two clusters (Giotis-Guruswami algorithm [SODA 2006]) from n^O(1/ε²) to O(n²log³n/ε² + n log n ⋅ (1/ε)^O(1/ε⁴)) time for (1+ε)-approximation. These results may be of independent interest. 

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