Pivot-based Maximal Biclique Enumeration

Enumerating maximal bicliques in a bipartite graph is an important problem in data mining, with innumerable real-world applications across different domains such as web community, bioinformatics, etc. Although substantial research has been conducted on this problem, surprisingly, we find that pivot-based search space pruning, which is quite effective in clique enumeration, has not been exploited in biclique scenario. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the pivot-based pruning for biclique enumeration. We propose an algorithm for implementing the pivot-based pruning, powered by an effective index structure Containment Directed Acyclic Graph (CDAG). Meanwhile, existing literature indicates contradictory findings on the order of vertex selection in biclique enumeration. As such, we re-examine the problem and suggest an offline ordering of vertices which expedites the pivot pruning. We conduct an extensive performance study using real-world datasets from a wide range of domains. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is more scalable and outperforms all the existing algorithms across all datasets and can achieve a significant speedup against the previous algorithms.