An exact algorithm for the maximum probabilistic clique problem

The maximum clique problem is a classical problem in combinatorial optimization that has a broad range of applications in graph-based data mining, social and biological network analysis and a variety of other fields. This article investigates the problem when the edges fail independently with known probabilities. This leads to the maximum probabilistic clique problem, which is to find a subset of vertices of maximum cardinality that forms a clique with probability at least \(\theta \in [0,1]\) , which is a user-specified probability threshold. We show that the probabilistic clique property is hereditary and extend a well-known exact combinatorial algorithm for the maximum clique problem to a sampling-free exact algorithm for the maximum probabilistic clique problem. The performance of the algorithm is benchmarked on a test-bed of DIMACS clique instances and on a randomly generated test-bed.