Graph downsizing: a fast heuristic for querying closely connected subgraphs

The vertex connectivity of a graph is the minimum number of vertices whose removal disconnects the graph, and it is a fundamental notion that measures the level of interconnectedness of vertices. Mining subgraphs with high vertex connectivity has wide applications in robust and efficient communication networks and the organization of task groups. However, existing approaches often neglect size constraints, leading to subgraphs that are either too large or too small for practical use. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the size constraint and formulate the graph downsizing problem: Given a graph G with n vertices and a positive integer $$\tau