Hendrik Molter

Enumerating maximal cliques in temporal graphs

Dynamics of interactions play an increasingly important role in the analysis of complex networks. A modeling framework to capture this are temporal graphs. We focus on enumerating Δ-cliques, an extension of the concept of cliques to temporal graphs: for a given time period Δ, a Δ-clique in a temporal graph is a set of vertices and a time interval such that all vertices interact with each other at least after every Δ time steps within the time interval. Viard, Latapy, and Magnien [ASONAM 2015] proposed a greedy algorithm for enumerating all maximal Δ-cliques in temporal graphs. In contrast to this approach, we adapt to the temporal setting the Bron-Kerbosch algorithm - an efficient, recursive backtracking algorithm which enumerates all maximal cliques in static graphs. We obtain encouraging results both in theory (concerning worst-case time analysis based on the parameter “Δ-slice degeneracy” of the underlying graph) as well as in practice with experiments on real-world data. The latter culminates in a significant improvement for most interesting Δ-values concerning running time in comparison with the algorithm of Viard, Latapy, and Magnien (typically two orders of magnitude).

Assessing the Computational Complexity of Multi-layer Subgraph Detection

Multi-layer graphs consist of several graphs (layers) over the same vertex set. They are motivated by real-world problems where entities (vertices) are associated via multiple types of relationships (edges in different layers). We chart the border of computational (in)tractability for the class of subgraph detection problems on multi-layer graphs, including fundamental problems such as maximum matching, finding certain clique relaxations (motivated by community detection), or path problems. Mostly encountering hardness results, sometimes even for two or three layers, we can also spot some islands of tractability.

Finding Secluded Places of Special Interest in Graphs

This work studies the parameterized complexity of finding secluded solutions to classical combinatorial optimization problems on graphs such as finding minimum s-t separators, feedback vertex sets, dominating sets, maximum independent sets, and vertex deletion problems for hereditary graph properties: Herein, one searches not only to minimize or maximize the size of the solution, but also to minimize the size of its neighborhood. This restriction has applications in secure routing and community detection.

The Complexity of Finding Small Separators in Temporal Graphs

Temporal graphs are graphs with time-stamped edges. We study the problem of finding a small vertex set (the separator) with respect to two designated terminal vertices such that the removal of the set eliminates all temporal paths connecting one terminal to the other. Herein, we consider two models of temporal paths: paths that pass through arbitrarily many edges per time step (non-strict) and paths that pass through at most one edge per time step (strict). Regarding the number of time steps of a temporal graph, we show a complexity dichotomy (NP-hardness versus polynomial-time solvability) for both problem variants. Moreover we prove both problem variants to be NP-complete even on temporal graphs whose underlying graph is planar. We further show that, on temporal graphs with planar underlying graph, if additionally the number of time steps is constant, then the problem variant for strict paths is solvable in quasi-linear time. Finally, we introduce and motivate the notion of a temporal core (vertices whose incident edges change over time). We prove that the non-strict variant is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of the temporal core, while the strict variant remains NP-complete, even for constant-size temporal cores.

The Parameterized Complexity of Centrality Improvement in Networks

The centrality of a vertex v in a network intuitively captures how important v is for communication in the network. The task of improving the centrality of a vertex has many applications, as a higher centrality often implies a larger impact on the network or less transportation or administration cost. In this work we study the parameterized complexity of the NP-complete problems Closeness Improvement and Betweenness Improvement in which we ask to improve a given vertex’ closeness or betweenness centrality by a given amount through adding a given number of edges to the network. Herein, the closeness of a vertex v sums the multiplicative inverses of distances of other vertices to v and the betweenness sums for each pair of vertices the fraction of shortest paths going through v. Unfortunately, for the natural parameter “number of edges to add” we obtain hardness results, even in rather restricted cases. On the positive side, we also give an island of tractability for the parameter measuring the vertex deletion distance to cluster graphs.

Efficient Algorithms for Measuring the Funnel-Likeness of DAGs

Funnels are a new natural subclass of DAGs. Intuitively, a DAG is a funnel if every source-sink path can be uniquely identified by one of its arcs. Funnels are an analog to trees for directed graphs that is more restrictive than DAGs but more expressive than in-/out-trees. Computational problems such as finding vertex-disjoint paths or tracking the origin of memes remain NP-hard on DAGs while on funnels they become solvable in polynomial time. Our main focus is the algorithmic complexity of finding out how funnel-like a given DAG is. To this end, we study the NP-hard problem of computing the arc-deletion distance to a funnel of a given DAG. We develop efficient exact and approximation algorithms for the problem and test them on synthetic random graphs and real-world graphs.

The parameterized complexity of finding secluded solutions to some classical optimization problems on graphs

This work studies the parameterized complexity of finding secluded solutions to classical combinatorial optimization problems on graphs such as finding minimum s-t separators, feedback vertex sets, dominating sets, maximum independent sets, and vertex deletion problems for hereditary graph properties: Herein, one searches not only to minimize or maximize the size of the solution, but also to minimize the size of its neighborhood. This restriction has applications in secure routing and community detection.

The Minimum Shared Edges Problem on Grid-Like Graphs

We study the \({\mathsf {NP}}\)-hard Minimum Shared Edges (MSE) problem on graphs: decide whether it is possible to route p paths from a start vertex to a target vertex in a given graph while using at most k edges more than once. We show that MSE can be decided on bounded (i.e. finite) grids in linear time when both dimensions are either small or large compared to the number p of paths. On the contrary, we show that MSE remains \({\mathsf {NP}}\)-hard on subgraphs of bounded grids.