Fast and simple decycling and dismantling of networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoreHD, a fast and simple algorithm for network decycling and dismantling that outperforms existing heuristics and rivals advanced message-passing methods in effectiveness while being computationally efficient.

Contribution

The paper presents CoreHD, a novel recursive algorithm that removes high-degree nodes from the 2-core, offering a practical and superior alternative to existing methods.

Findings

CoreHD outperforms simple heuristics in network dismantling.

CoreHD matches the effectiveness of message-passing algorithms on real networks.

CoreHD significantly reduces computational costs compared to existing methods.

Abstract

Decycling and dismantling of complex networks are underlying many important applications in network science. Recently these two closely related problems were tackled by several heuristic algorithms, simple and considerably sub-optimal, on the one hand, and time-consuming message-passing ones that evaluate single-node marginal probabilities, on the other hand. In this paper we propose a simple and extremely fast algorithm, CoreHD, which recursively removes nodes of the highest degree from the $2$-core of the network. CoreHD performs much better than all existing simple algorithms. When applied on real-world networks, it achieves equally good solutions as those obtained by the state-of-art iterative message-passing algorithms at greatly reduced computational cost, suggesting that CoreHD should be the algorithm of choice for many practical purposes.