Abstract

This paper considers the problem of computing the dense k-vertex subgraph of a given graph, namely, the subgraph with the most edges. An approximation algorithm is developed for the problem, with approximation ratio O(n ffi ), for some ffi ! 1=3. 1 Introduction We study the dense k-subgraph (DkS) maximization problem, of computing the dense k- vertex subgraph of a given graph. That is, on input a graph G and a parameter k, we are interested in finding a set of k vertices with maximum average degree in the subgraph induced by this set. As this problem is NP-hard (say, by reduction from Clique), we consider approximation algorithms for this problem. We obtain a polynomial time algorithm that on any input (G; k) returns a subgraph of size k whose average degree is within a factor of at most n ffi from the optimum solution, where n is the number of vertices in the input graph G, and ffi ! 1=3 is some universal constant. Unfortunately, we are unable to present a complementary negati...