A Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for Cluster Editing

The editing problem asks to transform a given graph into a disjoint union of cliques by inserting and deleting as few edges as possible. We describe and evaluate an exact branch-and-bound algorithm for cluster editing. For this, we introduce new reduction rules and adapt existing ones. Moreover, we generalize a known packing technique to obtain lower bounds and experimentally show that it contributes significantly to the performance of the solver. Our experiments further evaluate the effectiveness of the different reduction rules and examine the effects of structural properties of
the input graph on solver performance. Our solver won the exact track of the 2021 PACE challenge.