A Heuristic for Direct Product Graph Decomposition
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In this paper we describe a heuristic for decomposing a directed graph into factors according to the direct product (also known as Kronecker, cardinal or tensor product). Given a directed, unweighted graph G with adjacency matrix Adj(G), our heuristic searches for a pair of graphs G_1 and G_2 such that G = G_1 ⊗ G_2, where G_1 ⊗ G_2 is the direct product of G_1 and G_2. For undirected, connected graphs it has been shown that graph decomposition is "at least as difficult" as graph isomorphism; therefore, polynomial-time algorithms for decomposing a general directed graph into factors are unlikely to exist. Although graph factorization is a problem that has been extensively investigated, the heuristic proposed in this paper represents – to the best of our knowledge – the first computational approach for general directed, unweighted graphs. We have implemented our algorithm using the MATLAB environment; we report on a set of experiments that show that the proposed heuristic solves reasonably-sized instances in a few seconds on general-purpose hardware.
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