Abstract
Relaxed correlation clustering (RCC) is a vertex partitioning problem that aims at minimizing the so-called relaxed imbalance in signed graphs. RCC is considered to be an NP-hard unsupervised learning problem with applications in biology, economy, image recognition and social network analysis. In order to solve it, we propose two linear integer programming formulations and a local search-based metaheuristic. The latter relies on auxiliary data structures to efficiently perform move evaluations during the search process. Extensive computational experiments on existing and newly proposed benchmark instances demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approaches when compared to those available in the literature. While the exact approaches obtained optimal solutions for open problems, the proposed heuristic algorithm was capable of finding high quality solutions within a reasonable CPU time. In addition, we also report improving results for the symmetrical version of the problem. Moreover, we show the benefits of implementing the efficient move evaluation procedure that enables the proposed metaheuristic to be scalable, even for large-size instances.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior–Brasil (CAPES)–Finance Code 001 and by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientfífico e Tecnológico (CNPq), grants 305223/2015-1 and 303799/2018-8. We would also like to thank Mário Levorato for providing the SRCC source code and Pedro Liguori for the helpful insights on the mathematical models.
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Appendices
Appendix: Detailed results for the random RCC instances
Detailed results for the SRCC instances
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Queiroga, E., Subramanian, A., Figueiredo, R. et al. Integer programming formulations and efficient local search for relaxed correlation clustering. J Glob Optim 81, 919–966 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10898-020-00989-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10898-020-00989-7