Effective and Efficient Conductance-based Community Search at Billion Scale

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Main Authors: Lin, Longlong, He, Yue, Chen, Wei, Yuan, Pingpeng, Li, Rong-Hua, Jia, Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866913972120190976
author Lin, Longlong
He, Yue
Chen, Wei
Yuan, Pingpeng
Li, Rong-Hua
Jia, Tao
author_facet Lin, Longlong
He, Yue
Chen, Wei
Yuan, Pingpeng
Li, Rong-Hua
Jia, Tao
contents Community search is a widely studied semi-supervised graph clustering problem, retrieving a high-quality connected subgraph containing the user-specified query vertex. However, existing methods primarily focus on cohesiveness within the community but ignore the sparsity outside the community, obtaining sub-par results. Inspired by this, we adopt the well-known conductance metric to measure the quality of a community and introduce a novel problem of conductance-based community search (CCS). CCS aims at finding a subgraph with the smallest conductance among all connected subgraphs that contain the query vertex. We prove that the CCS problem is NP-hard. To efficiently query CCS, a four-stage subgraph-conductance-based community search algorithm, SCCS, is proposed. Specifically, we first greatly reduce the entire graph using local sampling techniques. Then, a three-stage local optimization strategy is employed to continuously refine the community quality. Namely, we first utilize a seeding strategy to obtain an initial community to enhance its internal cohesiveness. Then, we iteratively add qualified vertices in the expansion stage to guarantee the internal cohesiveness and external sparsity of the community. Finally, we gradually remove unqualified vertices during the verification stage. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets containing one billion-scale graph and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of our solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Effective and Efficient Conductance-based Community Search at Billion Scale
Lin, Longlong
He, Yue
Chen, Wei
Yuan, Pingpeng
Li, Rong-Hua
Jia, Tao
Social and Information Networks
Databases
Community search is a widely studied semi-supervised graph clustering problem, retrieving a high-quality connected subgraph containing the user-specified query vertex. However, existing methods primarily focus on cohesiveness within the community but ignore the sparsity outside the community, obtaining sub-par results. Inspired by this, we adopt the well-known conductance metric to measure the quality of a community and introduce a novel problem of conductance-based community search (CCS). CCS aims at finding a subgraph with the smallest conductance among all connected subgraphs that contain the query vertex. We prove that the CCS problem is NP-hard. To efficiently query CCS, a four-stage subgraph-conductance-based community search algorithm, SCCS, is proposed. Specifically, we first greatly reduce the entire graph using local sampling techniques. Then, a three-stage local optimization strategy is employed to continuously refine the community quality. Namely, we first utilize a seeding strategy to obtain an initial community to enhance its internal cohesiveness. Then, we iteratively add qualified vertices in the expansion stage to guarantee the internal cohesiveness and external sparsity of the community. Finally, we gradually remove unqualified vertices during the verification stage. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets containing one billion-scale graph and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of our solutions.
title Effective and Efficient Conductance-based Community Search at Billion Scale
topic Social and Information Networks
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01244