A Framework for Efficient Estimation of Closeness Centrality and Eccentricity in Large Networks

08 August 2025 Avec Patrick C. Trindade, Maximilien Dreveton, Daniel R. Figueiredo International Conference on Complex Networks, 2025

Centrality indices, such as closeness and eccentricity, are key to identifying influential nodes within a network, with applications ranging from social and biological networks to communication and transportation systems. However, computing these indices for every node in large graphs is computationally prohibitive due to the need for solving the All-Pairs Shortest Path (APSP)…

Optimal Graph Clustering without Edge Density Signals

18 July 2025 Avec Elaine Siyu Liu, Matthias Grossglauser, Patrick Thiran NeurIPS, 2025

This paper establishes the theoretical limits of graph clustering under the Popularity-Adjusted Block Model (PABM), addressing limitations of existing models. In contrast to the Stochastic Block Model (SBM), which assumes uniform vertex degrees, and to the Degree-Corrected Block Model (DCBM), which applies uniform degree corrections across clusters, PABM introduces separate popularity parameters for…

Reducing Sensor Requirements by Relaxing the Network Metric Dimension

03 May 2025 Avec Paula Mürmann, Robin Jaccard, Aryan Alavi Razavi Ravari, Patrick Thiran Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS), 2025

Source localization in graphs involves identifying the origin of a phenomenon or event, such as an epidemic outbreak or a misinformation source, by leveraging structural graph properties. One key concept in this context is the metric dimension, which quantifies the minimum number of strategically placed sensors needed to uniquely identify all vertices based…

Why the Metric Backbone Preserves Community Structure

06 November 2024 Avec Charbel Chucri, Matthias Grossglauser, and Patrick Thiran NeurIPS, 2024

The metric backbone of a weighted graph is the union of all-pairs shortest paths. It is obtained by removing all edges (u,v) that are not the shortest path between u and v. In networks with well-separated communities, the metric backbone tends to preserve many inter-community edges, because these edges serve as bridges connecting…

Universal Lower Bounds and Optimal Rates: Achieving Minimax Clustering Error in Sub-Exponential Mixture Models

01 July 2024 Avec Alperen Gözeten, Matthias Grossglauser, Patrick Thiran Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), 2024

Clustering is a pivotal challenge in unsupervised machine learning and is often investigated through the lens of mixture models. The optimal error rate for recovering cluster labels in Gaussian and sub-Gaussian mixture models involves ad hoc signal-to-noise ratios. Simple iterative algorithms, such as Lloyd’s algorithm, attain this optimal error rate. In this paper,…

Exact recovery and Bregman hard clustering of node-attributed Stochastic Block Model

21 September 2023 Avec Felipe Fernandes, Daniel Figueiredo NeurIPS, 2023

Classic network clustering tackles the problem of identifying sets of nodes (communities) that have similar connection patterns. However, in many scenarios nodes also have attributes that are correlated and can also be used to identify node clusters. Thus, network information (edges) and node information (attributes) can be jointly leveraged to design high-performance clustering…

Almost exact recovery in label spreading

04 July 2019 Avec Konstantin Avrachenkov WAW, 2019

In semi-supervised graph clustering setting, an expert provides cluster membership of few nodes. This little amount of information allows one to achieve high accuracy clustering using efficient computational procedures. Our main goal is to provide a theoretical justification why the graph-based semi-supervised learning works very well. Specifically, for the Stochastic Block Model in…