Finding dense and connected subgraphs in dual networks

Finding dense subgraphs is an important problem that has recently attracted a lot of interests. Most of the existing work focuses on a single graph (or network¹). In many real-life applications, however, there exist dual networks, in which one network represents the physical world and another network represents the conceptual world. In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding the densest connected subgraph (DCS) which has the largest density in the conceptual network and is also connected in the physical network. Such pattern cannot be identified using the existing algorithms for a single network. We show that even though finding the densest subgraph in a single network is polynomial time solvable, the DCS problem is NP-hard. We develop a two-step approach to solve the DCS problem. In the first step, we effectively prune the dual networks while guarantee that the optimal solution is contained in the remaining networks. For the second step, we develop two efficient greedy methods based on different search strategies to find the DCS. Different variations of the DCS problem are also studied. We perform extensive experiments on a variety of real and synthetic dual networks to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed methods.