A Fast Order-Based Approach for Core Maintenance

Abstract: Graphs have been widely used in many applications such as social networks, collaboration networks, and biological networks. One important graph analytics is to explore cohesive subgraphs in a large graph. Among several cohesive subgraphs studied, k-core is one that can be computed in linear time for a static graph. Since graphs are evolving in real applications, in this paper, we study core maintenance which is to reduce the computational cost to compute k-cores for a graph when graphs are updated from time to time dynamically. We identify drawbacks of the existing efficient algorithm, which needs a large search space to find the vertices that need to be updated, and has high overhead to maintain the index built, when a graph is updated. We propose a new order-based approach to maintain an order, called k-order, among vertices, while a graph is updated. Our new algorithm can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm up to 3 orders of magnitude for the 11 large real graphs tested. We report our findings in this paper.