TDB: Breaking All Hop-Constrained Cycles in Billion-Scale Directed Graphs

The Feedback vertex set with the minimum size is one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems targeted at breaking all the cycles in a graph. This problem is applicable to a broad variety of domains, including E-commerce networks, database systems, and program analysis. In reality, users are frequently most concerned with the hop-constrained cycles (i.e., cycles with a limited number of hops). For instance, in the E-commerce networks, the fraud detection team would discard cycles with a high number of hops since they are less relevant and grow exponentially in size. Thus, it is quite reasonable to investigate the feedback vertex set problem in the context of hop-constrained cycles, namely hop-constrained cycle cover problem. It is concerned with determining a set of vertices that covers all hop-constrained cycles in a given directed graph. A common method to solve this is to use a bottom-up algorithm, where it iteratively selects cover vertices into the result set. Based on this paradigm, the existing works mainly focus on the vertices orders and several heuristic strategies. In this paper, a totally opposite cover process topdown is proposed and bounds are presented on it. Surprisingly, both theoretical time complexity and practical performance are improved. On the theoretical side, this work is the first to achieve O(k • n • m) time complexity, whereas the state-of-the-art method achieves time complexity of O(n k ). 1 On the practical level, the proposed algorithm, namely TDB++, outperforms the state-of-the-art by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude on average while preserving the minimal property. As a result, the method in this paper outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both running time and theoretical time complexity. This is the first time, to our best knowledge, that the hop-constrained cycle cover problem on billion-scale networks has been solved with a minimal 2 cover set for k > 3.