On Breaking Truss-Based and Core-Based Communities

We introduce the general problem of identifying a smallest edge subset of a given graph whose deletion makes the graph community-free. We consider this problem under two community notions which have attracted significant attention: k-truss and k-core. We also introduce a problem variant where the identified subset contains edges incident to a given set of nodes and ensures that these nodes are not contained in any community; k-truss or k-core, in our case. These problems are directly applicable in social networks: the identified edges can be hidden by users or sanitized from the output graph; or in communication networks: the identified edges correspond to vital network connections. We present a series of theoretical and practical results. On the theoretical side, we show through non-trivial reductions that the problems we introduce are NP-hard and, in fact, hard to approximate. For the k-truss based problems, we also show exact exponential-time algorithms, as well as a non-trivial lower bound on the size of an optimal solution. On the practical side, we develop a series of heuristics which are sped up by efficient data structures that we propose for updating the truss or core decomposition under edge deletions. In addition, we develop an algorithm to compute the lower bound. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world and synthetic graphs show that our heuristics are effective, outperforming natural baselines, and also efficient (up to two orders of magnitude faster than a natural baseline) thanks to our data structures. Furthermore, we present a case study on a co-authorship network and experiments showing that the removal of edges identified by our heuristics does not substantially affect the clustering structure of the input graph.

This work extends a KDD 2021 paper, providing new theoretical results as well as introducing core-based problems and algorithms.