Efficient Personalized Maximum Biclique Search

Abstract

Bipartite graphs are naturally used to model relationships between two different types of entities. On bipartite graphs, maximum biclique search is a fundamental problem that aims to find the complete bipartite subgraph (biclique) with the maximum number of edges and is widely adopted for many applications such as anomaly detection in E-commerce and social network analysis. However, maximum biclique search only identifies the biclique whose size is globally maximum, whereas fast microscopic (personalized) analysis is needed in many real-world scenarios. For instance, when a suspected user is identified in an E-commerce network (e.g., a user-product network), it is important to quickly find the anomalous group containing the user and send the group of users for further human expert investigation. To fill this research gap, for the first time, we study the efficient personalized maximum biclique search problem, which aims to find the maximum biclique containing a specific query vertex in real-time. Apart from online computation algorithms, we explore index-based approaches and propose the PMBC-Index. With the PMBC-Index, the query algorithm is up to five orders of magnitude faster than the baseline algorithms. Furthermore, effective pruning strategies and parallelization techniques are devised to support efficient index construction. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world graphs validate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposed techniques.