A Change-Sensitive Algorithm for Maintaining Maximal Bicliques in a Dynamic Bipartite Graph

We consider the maintenance of maximal bicliques from a dynamic bipartite graph that changes over time due to the addition or deletion of edges. When the set of edges in a graph changes, we are interested in knowing the change in the set of maximal bicliques (the "change"), rather than in knowing the set of maximal bicliques that remain unaffected. The challenge in an efficient algorithm is to enumerate the change without explicitly enumerating the set of all maximal bicliques. In this work, we present (1) near-tight bounds on the magnitude of change in the set of maximal bicliques of a graph, due to a change in the edge set (2) a "change-sensitive" algorithm for enumerating the change in the set of maximal bicliques, whose time complexity is proportional to the magnitude of change that actually occurred in the set of maximal bicliques in the graph. To our knowledge, these are the first algorithms for enumerating maximal bicliques in a dynamic graph, with such provable performance guarantees. Our algorithms are easy to implement, and experimental results show that their performance exceeds that of current baseline implementations by orders of magnitude.