Maximal Quasi-Cliques Mining in Uncertain Graphs

Cohesive subgraph mining is a fundamental problem in the field of graph data analysis. Many existing cohesive graph mining algorithms are mainly tailored to deterministic graphs. Real-world graphs, however, are often not deterministic, but uncertain in nature. Applications of such uncertain graphs include protein-protein interactions networks with experimentally inferred links and sensor networks with uncertain connectivity links. In this article, we study the problem of mining cohesive subgraphs from an uncertain graph. Specifically, we introduce a new (α,γ)-quasi-clique model to model the cohesive subgraphs in an uncertain graph, and propose a basic enumeration algorithm to find all maximal (α,γ)-quasi-cliques. We also develop an advanced enumeration algorithm based on several novel pruning rules, including early termination and candidate set reduction. To further improve the efficiency, we propose several optimization techniques. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our solutions are almost three times faster than the baseline approach.