Effective k-Vertex Connected Component Detection in Large-Scale Networks

Finding components with high connectivity is an important problem in component detection with a wide range of applications, e.g., social network analysis, web-page research and bioinformatics. In particular, k-edge connected component (k-ECC) has recently been extensively studied to discover disjoint components. Yet many real applications present needs and challenges for overlapping components. In this paper, we propose a k-vertex connected component (k-VCC) model, which is much more cohesive and therefore allows overlapping between components. To find k-VCCs, a top-down framework is first developed to find the exact k-VCCs. To further reduce the high computational cost for input networks of large sizes, a bottom-up framework is then proposed. Instead of using the structure of the entire network, it locally identifies the seed subgraphs, and obtains the heuristic k-VCCs by expanding and merging these seed subgraphs. Comprehensive experimental results on large real and synthetic networks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approaches.