Dense core model for cohesive subgraph discovery

Discovery of cohesive subgraphs is an important issue in social network analysis. As representative cohesive subgraphs, pseudo cliques have been developed by relaxing the perfection of cliques. By enumerating pseudo clique subgraphs, we can find some structures of interest such as a star-like structure. However, a little more complicated structures such as a core/periphery structure is still hard to be found by them. Therefore, we propose a novel pseudo clique called p-dense core and show the connection with the other pseudo cliques. Moreover, we show that a set of p-dense core subgraphs gives an optimal solution in a graph partitioning problem. Several experiments on real-life networks demonstrated the effectiveness for cohesive subgraph discovery. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.