Engineering topics
Safro, I
Publications and source records attributed to Safro, I.
Algebraic distance on graphs.
Measuring the connection strength between a pair of vertices in a graph is one of the most important concerns in many graph applications. Simple measures such as edge weights may not be sufficient for capturing the effects associated with short paths of lengths greater than one. In this paper, we consider an iterative process that smooths an associated value for nearby vertices, and we present a measure of the local connection strength (called the algebraic distance; see [D. Ron, I. Safro, and A. Brandt, Multiscale Model. Simul., 9 (2011), pp. 407-423]) based on this process. The proposed measure is attractive in that the process is simple, linear, and easily parallelized. An analysis of the convergence property of the process reveals that the local neighborhoods play an important role in determining the connectivity between vertices. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed measure through several combinatorial optimization problems on graphs and hypergraphs.
Relaxation-based coarsening and multiscale graph organization.
In this paper we generalize and improve the multiscale organization of graphs by introducing a new measure that quantifies the 'closeness' between two nodes. The calculation of the measure is linear in the number of edges in the graph and involves just a small number of relaxation sweeps. A similar notion of distance is then calculated and used at each coarser level. We demonstrate the use of this measure in multiscale methods for several important combinatorial optimization problems and discuss the multiscale graph organization.