In blocking $K$-armed bandits, playing an arm renders it unavailable for a fixed number of future rounds. While this model is relatively well understood in the stochastic regime, much less is known when rewards are generated adversarially. Via a novel reduction, we first show that computing the total reward of the best dynamic policy is NP-hard, even when the blocking time $d > 1$ is identical across arms. We therefore turn to tractable comparators and study the class of $d$-periodic policies, proving that the optimal periodic policy is efficiently computable and always obtains at least a $\frac{1}{K}$ fraction of the dynamic optimum. We also show that this $\frac{1}{K}$ factor is information-theoretically tight: no algorithm can achieve sublinear $\alpha$-regret with respect to the offline optimal dynamic policy for any $\alpha > \frac{1}{K}$. Our main result shows that $T^{2/3}$ is the minimax rate for the regret (against periodic policies) for adversarial blocking bandits with identical blocking times, and that this rate is achievable by an efficient algorithm. Our main technical contribution is the lower bound, which establishes that blocking bandits are at least as hard as bandits with switching costs. The matching upper bound instead follows from a reduction to combinatorial semi-bandits over bipartite matchings. Finally, we show that $\sqrt{T}$ regret rates are efficiently achievable in the full information setting, and more generally via $\alpha$-regret with $\alpha = \frac{1}{2}$.

Maximizing a single submodular set function subject to a cardinality constraint is a well-studied and central topic in combinatorial optimization. However, finding a set that maximizes multiple functions at the same time is much less understood, even though it is a formulation which naturally occurs in robust maximization or problems with fairness considerations such as fair influence maximization or fair allocation. In this work, we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum over many submodular functions subject to a cardinality constraint, which is known as multiobjective submodular maximization. All known polynomial-time approximation algorithms either obtain a weak approximation guarantee or rely on the evaluation of the multilinear extension. The latter is expensive to evaluate and renders such algorithms impractical. We bridge this gap and introduce the first scalable and practical algorithm that obtains the best-known approximation guarantee. We furthermore introduce a novel application fair centrality maximization and show how it can be addressed via multiobjective submodular maximization. In our experimental evaluation, we show that our algorithm outperforms known algorithms in terms of objective value and running time.

The bulk of the literature on opinion optimization in social networks adopts the Friedkin–Johnsen (FJ) opinion dynamics model, in which the innate opinions of all nodes are known: this is an unrealistic assumption. In this paper, we study opinion optimization under the FJ model without the full knowledge of innate opinions. Specifically, we borrow from the literature a series of objective functions, aimed at minimizing polarization and/or disagreement, and we tackle the budgeted optimization problem, where we can query the innate opinions of only a limited number of nodes. Given the complexity of our problem, we propose a framework based on three steps: (1) select the limited number of nodes we query, (2) reconstruct the innate opinions of all nodes based on those queried, and (3) optimize the objective function with the reconstructed opinions. For each step of the framework, we present and systematically evaluate several effective strategies. A key contribution of our work is a rigorous error propagation analysis that quantifies how reconstruction errors in innate opinions impact the quality of the final solutions. Our experiments on various synthetic and real-world datasets show that we can effectively minimize polarization and disagreement even if we have quite limited information about innate opinions.

Knowledge graphs form large networks of millions of entities (e.g., Michelle Obama, Barack Obama) and relationships (e.g., married). To obtain an overview of the entity, we need to inspect a potentially large number of relationships to other entities. For this reason, entity summarization aims to extract succinct but expressive descriptions of each entity. Yet, existing methods build their summaries only based on the immediate connections of an entity, disregarding how indirect relationships contain essential information for describing the entity (e.g., understanding Michelle Obama also via her husband's role as former president). We propose IRES, an unsupervised entity summarization method built on graph theoretical principles. We draw a notable connection between the informativeness of a summary and graph partitioning, and devise an effective approach to learn diverse aspects that characterize an entity. In a comprehensive experimental study, IRES shows superior summary quality. In particular, when full neighborhood information is available, IRES outperforms existing methods by 6 percentage points F1 while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.

We study a general clustering setting in which we have $n$ elements to be clustered, and we aim to perform as few queries as possible to an oracle that returns a noisy sample of the weighted similarity between two elements. Our setting encompasses many application domains in which the similarity function is costly to compute and inherently noisy. We introduce two novel formulations of online learning problems rooted in the paradigm of Pure Exploration in Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandits (PE-CMAB): fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. For both settings, we design algorithms that combine a sampling strategy with a classic approximation algorithm for correlation clustering and study their theoretical guarantees. Our results are the first examples of polynomial-time algorithms that work for the case of PE-CMAB in which the underlying offline optimization problem is NP-hard.

We study the classic problem of prediction with expert advice under bandit feedback. Our model assumes that one action, corresponding to the learner's abstention from play, has no reward or loss on every trial. We propose the CBA (Confidence-rated Bandits with Abstentions) algorithm, which exploits this assumption to obtain reward bounds that can significantly improve those of the classical Exp4 algorithm. Our problem can be construed as the aggregation of confidence-rated predictors, with the learner having the option to abstain from play. We are the first to achieve bounds on the expected cumulative reward for general confidence-rated predictors. In the special case of specialists, we achieve a novel reward bound, significantly improving previous bounds of SpecialistExp (treating abstention as another action). We discuss how CBA can be applied to the problem of adversarial contextual bandits with the option of abstaining from selecting any action. We are able to leverage a wide range of inductive biases, outperforming previous approaches both theoretically and in preliminary experimental analysis. Additionally, we achieve a reduction in runtime from quadratic to almost linear in the number of contexts for the specific case of metric space contexts.

Centrality measures, quantifying the importance of vertices or edges, play a fundamental role in network analysis. To date, triggered by some positive approximability results, a large body of work has been devoted to studying centrality maximization, where the goal is to maximize the centrality score of a target vertex by manipulating the structure of a given network. On the other hand, due to the lack of such results, only very little attention has been paid to centrality minimization, despite its practical usefulness.

Dense subgraph discovery methods are routinely used in a variety of applications including the identification of a team of skilled individuals for collaboration from a social network. However, when the network's node set is associated with a sensitive attribute such as race, gender, religion, or political opinion, the lack of diversity can lead to lawsuits.

Network analysis has played a key role in knowledge discovery and data mining. In many real-world applications in recent years, we are interested in mining multilayer networks, where we have a number of edge sets called layers, which encode different types of connections and/or time-dependent connections over the same set of vertices. Among many network analysis techniques, dense subgraph discovery, aiming to find a dense component in a network, is an essential primitive with a variety of applications in diverse domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization model for dense subgraph discovery in multilayer networks. Our model aims to find a stochastic solution, i.e., a probability distribution over the family of vertex subsets, rather than a single vertex subset, whereas it can also be used for obtaining a single vertex subset. For our model, we design an LP-based polynomial-time exact algorithm. Moreover, to handle large-scale networks, we also devise a simple, scalable preprocessing algorithm, which often reduces the size of the input networks significantly and results in a substantial speed-up. Computational experiments demonstrate the validity of our model and the effectiveness of our algorithms.

Dense subgraph discovery is a fundamental problem in graph mining whose goal is to extract a dense subgraph from a given graph, and it has a wide range of applications [18]. However, numerous real-world applications, ranging from computational biology and computational neuroscience to computational social science, take as input a dual graph, namely a pair of graphs on the same set of nodes. Despite the large number of such applications, research on dense subgraph discovery has focused on a single graph input, with few notable exceptions [9, 22, 35, 36]. In this work, we contribute to this line of research by studying the following novel algorithmic problem: Given a pair of graphs G, H on the same set of nodes V, how do we find a subset of nodes S ⊆ V that induces a well-connected subgraph in G and a dense subgraph in H? Our formulation generalizes previous research [11, 44, 45], by enabling to control the connectivity constraint on G. We propose a mathematical formulation and prove that it is solvable exactly in polynomial time. We compare our method to state-of-the-art competitors and find empirically that controlling the connectivity constraint enables the practitioner to obtain information that is otherwise inaccessible. Finally, we show that our proposed mining tool can be used to better understand how users interact on Twitter and connectivity aspects of human brain networks with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Many social phenomena are triggered by public opinion that is formed in the process of opinion exchange among individuals. To date, from the engineering point of view, a large body of work has been devoted to studying how to manipulate individual opinions so as to guide public opinion towards the desired state. Recently, Abebe et al. (KDD 2018) have initiated the study of the impact of interventions at the level of susceptibility rather than the interventions that directly modify individual opinions themselves. For the model, Chan et al. (The Web Conference 2019) designed a local search algorithm to find an optimal solution in polynomial time. However, it can be seen that the solution obtained by solving the above model might not be implemented in real-world scenarios. In fact, as we do not consider the amount of changes of the susceptibility, it would be too costly to change the susceptibility values for agents based on the solution.

The modularity is the best known and widely used quality function for community detection in graphs. We investigate the approximability of the modularity maximization problem and some related problems. We first design a polynomial-time 0.4209-additive approximation algorithm for the modularity maximization problem, which improves the current best additive approximation error of 0.4672. Our theoretical analysis also demonstrates that the proposed algorithm obtains a nearly-optimal solution for any instance with a high modularity value. We next design a polynomial-time 0.1660-additive approximation algorithm for the maximum modularity cut problem. Finally, we extend our algorithm to some related problems.

Dense subgraph discovery aims to find a dense component in edge-weighted graphs. This is a fundamental graph-mining task with a variety of applications and thus has received much attention recently. Although most existing methods assume that each individual edge weight is easily obtained, such an assumption is not necessarily valid in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel learning problem for dense subgraph discovery in which a learner queries edge subsets rather than only single edges and observes a noisy sum of edge weights in a queried subset. For this problem, we first propose a polynomial-time algorithm that obtains a nearly-optimal solution with high probability. Moreover, to deal with large-sized graphs, we design a more scalable algorithm with a theoretical guarantee. Computational experiments using real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.

A hypergraph is a useful combinatorial object to model ternary or higher-order relations among entities. Clustering hypergraphs is a fundamental task in network analysis. In this study, we develop two clustering algorithms based on personalized PageRank on hypergraphs. The first one is local in the sense that its goal is to find a tightly connected vertex set with a bounded volume including a specified vertex. The second one is global in the sense that its goal is to find a tightly connected vertex set. For both algorithms, we discuss theoretical guarantees on the conductance of the output vertex set. Also, we experimentally demonstrate that our clustering algorithms outperform existing methods in terms of both the solution quality and running time. To the best of our knowledge, ours are the first practical algorithms for hypergraphs with theoretical guarantees on the conductance of the output set.

We study the problem of stochastic multiple-arm identification, where an agent sequentially explores a size-[Formula: see text] subset of arms (also known as a super arm) from given [Formula: see text] arms and tries to identify the best super arm. Most work so far has considered the semi-bandit setting, where the agent can observe the reward of each pulled arm or assumed each arm can be queried at each round. However, in real-world applications, it is costly or sometimes impossible to observe a reward of individual arms. In this study, we tackle the full-bandit setting, where only a noisy observation of the total sum of a super arm is given at each pull. Although our problem can be regarded as an instance of the best arm identification in linear bandits, a naive approach based on linear bandits is computationally infeasible since the number of super arms [Formula: see text] is exponential. To cope with this problem, we first design a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for a 0-1 quadratic programming problem arising in confidence ellipsoid maximization. Based on our approximation algorithm, we propose a bandit algorithm whose computation time is [Formula: see text](log [Formula: see text]), thereby achieving an exponential speedup over linear bandit algorithms. We provide a sample complexity upper bound that is still worst-case optimal. Finally, we conduct experiments on large-scale data sets with more than 10[Formula: see text] super arms, demonstrating the superiority of our algorithms in terms of both the computation time and the sample complexity.

Aggregating responses from crowd workers is a fundamental task in the process of crowdsourcing. In cases where a few experts are overwhelmed by a large number of non-experts, most answer aggregation algorithms such as the majority voting fail to identify the correct answers. Therefore, it is crucial to extract reliable experts from the crowd workers. In this study, we introduce the notion of "expert core", which is a set of workers that is very unlikely to contain a non-expert. We design a graph-mining-based efficient algorithm that exactly computes the expert core. To answer the aggregation task, we propose two types of algorithms. The first one incorporates the expert core into existing answer aggregation algorithms such as the majority voting, whereas the second one utilizes information provided by the expert core extraction algorithm pertaining to the reliability of workers. We then give a theoretical justification for the first type of algorithm. Computational experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed answer aggregation algorithms outperform state-of-the-art algorithms.

We consider the following general graph clustering problem: given a complete undirected graph G=(V,E,c) with an edge weight function c:E->Q, we are asked to find a partition C of V that maximizes the sum of edge weights within the clusters in C. Owing to its high generality, this problem has a wide variety of real-world applications, including correlation clustering, group technology, and community detection. In this study, we investigate the design of mathematical programming formulations and constraint satisfaction formulations for the problem. First, we present a novel integer linear programming (ILP) formulation that has far fewer constraints than the standard ILP formulation by Groetschel and Wakabayashi (1989). Second, we propose an ILP-based exact algorithm that solves an ILP problem obtained by modifying our above ILP formulation and then performs simple post-processing to produce an optimal solution to the original problem. Third, we present maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) counterparts of both our ILP formulation and ILP-based exact algorithm. Computational experiments using well-known real-world datasets demonstrate that our ILP-based approaches and their MaxSAT counterparts are highly effective in terms of both memory efficiency and computation time.

Community detection is one of the fundamental tasks in graph mining, which has many real-world applications in diverse domains. In this study, we propose an optimization model for finding a community that is densely connected internally but sparsely connected to the rest of the graph. The model extends the densest subgraph problem, in which we maximize the density while minimizing the average cut size. We first show that our proposed model can be solved efficiently. Then we design two polynomial-time exact algorithms based on linear programming and a maximum flow algorithm, respectively. Moreover, to deal with larger-sized graphs in practice, we present a scalable greedy algorithm that runs in almost linear time with theoretical performance guarantee of the output. In addition, as our model is closely related to a quality function called the modularity density, we show that our algorithms can also be used to find global community structure in a graph. With thorough experiments using well-known real-world graphs, we demonstrate that our algorithms are highly effective in finding a suitable community in a graph. For example, for web-Google, our algorithm finds a solution with more than 99.1% density and less than 3.1% cut size, compared with a solution obtained by a baseline algorithm for the densest subgraph problem.

Dense subgraph discovery is an important primitive in graph mining, which has a wide variety of applications in diverse domains. In the densest subgraph problem, given an undirected graph G = (V, E) with an edge-weight vector w = (We)e∈E, we aim to find a subset of vertices S that maximizes the density, i.e., w(S) / |S|, where w(S) is the sum of the weights of the edges in the subgraph induced by S. Although the densest subgraph problem is one of the most well-studied optimization problems for dense subgraph discovery, there is an implicit strong assumption; it is assumed that the weights of all the edges are known exactly as input. In real-world applications, there are often cases where we have only uncertain information of the edge weights. In this study, we provide a framework for dense subgraph discovery under the uncertainty of edge weights. Specifically, we address such an uncertainty issue using the theory of robust optimization. First, we formulate our fundamental problem, the robust densest subgraph problem, and present a simple algorithm. We then formulate the robust densest subgraph problem with sampling oracle that models dense subgraph discovery using an edge-weight sampling oracle, and present an algorithm with a strong theoretical performance guarantee. Computational experiments using both synthetic graphs and popular real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

Given an edge-weighted undirected graph G = (V, E, w), the density of S subseteq V is defined as w(S)/|S|, where w(S) is the sum of weights of the edges in the subgraph induced by S. The densest subgraph problem asks for S subseteq V that maximizes the density w(S)/|S|. The problem has received significant attention recently because it can be solved exactly in polynomial time. However, the densest subgraph problem has a drawback; it may happen that the obtained subset is too large or too small in comparison with the desired size of the output. In this study, we address the size issue by generalizing the density of S subseteq V. Specifically, we introduce the f -density of S subseteq V, which is defined as w(S)/f (|S|), where f : Z geq 0 to R geq 0 is a monotonically non-decreasing function. In the f-densest subgraph problem (f-DS), we are asked to find S subseteq V that maximizes the f-density w(S)/f (|S|). Although f-DS does not explicitly specify the size of the output subset of vertices, we can handle the above size issue using a convex size function f or a concave size function f appropriately. For f-DS with convex function f, we propose a nearly-linear-time algorithm with a provable approximation guarantee. In particular, for f-DS with f(x) = x^alpha (alpha in [1, 2]), our algorithm has an approximation ratio of 2 · n^{(alpha-1)(2-alpha)}. On the other hand, for f-DS with concave function f , we propose a linear-programming-based polynomial-time exact algorithm. It should be emphasized that this algorithm obtains not only an optimal solution to the problem but also subsets of vertices corresponding to the extreme points of the upper convex hull of {(|S|, w(S)) | S subseteq V }, which we refer to as the dense frontier points. We also propose a flow-based combinatorial exact algorithm for unweighted graphs that runs in O(n^3) time. Finally, we propose a nearly-linear-time 3-approximation algorithm.

In this study, we introduce a novel quality function for a network community, which we refer to as the communitude. The communitude has a strong statistical background. Specifically, it measures the Z-score of a subset of vertices S with respect to the fraction of the number of edges within the subgraph induced by S. Due to the null model of a random graph used in the definition, our quality function focuses not only on the inside of the subgraph but also on the cut edges, unlike some quality functions for extracting dense subgraphs. To evaluate the detection ability of our quality function, we address the communitude maximization problem and its variants for realistic scenarios. For the problems, we propose a two-phase heuristic algorithm together with some modified versions. In the first phase, it repeatedly removes the vertex with the smallest degree, and then obtains the subgraph with maximum communitude over the iterations. In the second phase, the algorithm improves the obtained solution using a simple local search heuristic. This algorithm runs in linear time when the number of iterations is fixed to a constant; thus, it is applicable to massive graphs. Computational experiments using both synthetic graphs and real-world networks demonstrate the validity and reliability of the proposed quality function and algorithms.

We propose a new influence model for allocating budgets to advertising channels. Our model captures customer’s sensitivity to advertisements as a threshold behavior; a customer is expected to be influenced if the influence he receives exceeds his threshold. Over the threshold model, we discuss two optimization problems. The first one is the budget-constrained influence maximization. We propose two greedy algorithms based on different strategies, and analyze the performance when the influence is submodular. We then introduce a new characteristic to measure the cost-effectiveness of a marketing campaign, that is, the proportion of the resulting influence to the cost spent. We design an almost linear-time approximation algorithm to maximize the cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, we design a better-approximation algorithm based on linear programming for a special case. We conduct thorough experiments to confirm that our algorithms outperform baseline algorithms.