GRASS: Graph Spectral Sparsification Leveraging Scalable Spectral Perturbation Analysis

Spectral graph sparsification aims to find ultra-sparse subgraphs whose Laplacian matrix can well approximate the original Laplacian eigenvalues and eigenvectors. In recent years, spectral sparsification techniques have been extensively studied for accelerating various numerical and graph-related applications. Prior nearly-linear-time spectral sparsification methods first extract low-stretch spanning tree from the original graph to form the backbone of the sparsifier, and then recover small portions of spectrally-critical off-tree edges to the spanning tree to significantly improve the approximation quality. However, it is not clear how many off-tree edges should be recovered for achieving a desired spectral similarity level within the sparsifier. Motivated by recent graph signal processing techniques, this paper proposes a similarity-aware spectral graph sparsification framework that leverages efficient spectral off-tree edge embedding and filtering schemes to construct spectral sparsifiers with guaranteed spectral similarity (relative condition number) level. An iterative graph densification scheme is also introduced to facilitate efficient and effective filtering of off-tree edges for highly ill-conditioned problems. The proposed method has been validated using various kinds of graphs obtained from public domain sparse matrix collections relevant to VLSI CAD, finite element analysis, as well as social and data networks frequently studied in many machine learning and data mining applications. For instance, a sparse SDD matrix with 40 million unknowns and 180 million nonzeros can be solved (1E-3 accuracy level) within two minutes using a single CPU core and about 6GB memory.