A New Coarsening Strategy for Multilevel Graph Partitioning

When applying multilevel scheme to solve the graph partitioning problem, shortcomings and limitations exist in the state-of-the-art coarsening schemes depend mainly on finding maximal matchings to obtain the coarse graphs, which can cause the multilevel algorithms to produce poor-quality solutions. This paper proposes an improved coarsening scheme by improving vertex combining strategy and edge ordering criteria. The new coarsening scheme is more effective in quality, which is proved by both theoretical analysis and experimental results.