A Graph-Theoretic Formulation of Exploratory Blockmodeling

Abstract

We present a new simple graph-theoretic formulation of the exploratory blockmodeling problem on undirected and unweighted one-mode networks. Our formulation takes as input the network G and the maximum number t of blocks for the solution model. The task is to find a minimum-size set of edge insertions and deletions that transform the input graph G into a graph G ′ with at most t neighborhood classes. Herein, a neighborhood class is a maximal set of vertices with the same neighborhood. The neighborhood classes of G ′ directly give the blocks and block interactions of the computed blockmodel. We analyze the classic and parameterized complexity of the exploratory blockmodeling problem, provide a branch-and-bound algorithm, an ILP formulation and several heuristics. Finally, we compare our exact algorithms to previous ILP-based approaches and show that the new algorithms are faster for t ≥ 4. 2012 ACM