AMBEA: Aggressive Maximal Biclique Enumeration in Large Bipartite Graph Computing

Maximal biclique enumeration (MBE) in bipartite graphs is a fundamental problem in data mining with widespread applications. Many recent works solve this problem based on the set-enumeration (SE) tree, which sequentially traverses vertices to generate the enumeration tree nodes representing distinct bicliques, then checks whether these bicliques are maximal or not. However, existing MBE algorithms only expand bicliques with untraversed vertices to ensure distinction, which often necessitate extensive node checks to eliminate non-maximal bicliques, resulting in significant computational overhead during the enumeration process. To address this issue, we propose an aggressive set-enumeration (ASE) tree that aggressively expands all bicliques to their maximal form, thus avoiding costly node checks on non-maximal bicliques. This aggressive enumeration may produce multiple duplicate maximal bicliques, but we efficiently eliminate these duplicates by leveraging the connection between parent and child nodes and conducting low-cost node checking. Additionally, we introduce an aggressive merge-based pruning (AMP) approach that aggressively merges vertices sharing the same local neighbors. This helps prune numerous duplicate node generations caused by subsets of merged vertices. We integrate the AMP approach into the ASE tree, and present the Aggressive Maximal Biclique Enumeration Algorithm (AMBEA). Experimental results show that AMBEA is 1.15 $\times$ to 5.32 $\times$ faster than its closest competitor and exhibits better scalability and parallelization capabilities on larger bipartite graphs.