Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    A Fast Heuristic for Computing Geodesic Closures in Large Networks
    ( 2022-11-06)
    Seiffarth, Florian
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    Motivated by the increasing interest in applications of graph geodesic convexity in machine learning and data mining, we present a heuristic for approximating the geodesic convex hull of node sets in large networks. It generates a small set of (almost) maximal outerplanar spanning subgraphs for the input graph, computes the geodesic closure in each of these graphs, and regards a node as an element of the convex hull if it belongs to the closed sets for at least a user specified number of outerplanar graphs. Our heuristic algorithm runs in time linear in the number of edges of the input graph, i.e., it is faster with one order of magnitude than the standard algorithm computing the closure exactly. Its performance is evaluated empirically by approximating convexity based core-periphery decomposition of networks. Our experimental results with large real-world networks show that for most networks, the proposed heuristic was able to produce close approximations significantly faster than the standard algorithm computing the exact convex hulls. For example, while our algorithm calculated an approximate core-periphery decomposition in 5 h or less for networks with more than 20 million edges, the standard algorithm did not terminate within 50 days.
  • Publication
    A Simple Heuristic for the Graph Tukey Depth Problem with Potential Applications to Graph Mining
    ( 2022)
    Seiffarth, Florian
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    We study a recently introduced adaptation of Tukey depth to graphs and discuss its algorithmic properties and potential applications to mining and learning with graphs. In particular, since it is NP-hard to compute the Tukey depth of a node, as a first contribution we provide a simple heuristic based on maximal closed set separation in graphs and show empirically on different graph datasets that its approximation error is small. Our second contribution is concerned with geodesic core-periphery decompositions of graphs. We show empirically that the geodesic core of a graph consists of those nodes that have a high Tukey depth. This information allows for a parameterized deterministic definition of the geodesic core of a graph.
  • Publication
    Maximal Closed Set and Half-Space Separations in Finite Closure Systems
    ( 2020)
    Seiffarth, Florian
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    Motivated by various binary classification problems in structured data (e.g., graphs or other relational and algebraic structures), we investigate some algorithmic properties of closed set and half-space separation in abstract closure systems. Assuming that the underlying closure system is finite and given by the corresponding closure operator, we formulate some negative and positive complexity results for these two separation problems. In particular, we prove that deciding half-space separability in abstract closure systems is NP-complete in general. On the other hand, for the relaxed problem of maximal closed set separation we propose a simple greedy algorithm and show that it is efficient and has the best possible lower bound on the number of closure operator calls. As a second direction to overcome the negative result above, we consider Kakutani closure systems and show first that our greedy algorithm provides an algorithmic characterization of this kind of set systems. As one of the major potential application fields, we then focus on Kakutani closure systems over graphs and generalize a fundamental characterization result based on the Pasch axiom to graph structure partitioning of finite sets. Though the primary focus of this work is on the generality of the results obtained, we experimentally demonstrate the practical usefulness of our approach on vertex classification in different graph datasets.