I need to do a maximum weight matching in bipartite graphs rather than maximum weight perfect matching (which means that there is no need to match all the nodes).
The nodes each side are both (at most) the level of 10^3 and are usually unbalanced in size. The graph is globally sparse while locally dense. (I don't know whether this will give any insight. You may ignore this and see the problem as a maximum weight matching in a complete graph.)
To explain this more precisely, I'll give some examples:
Example 1: 100 lefthand side nodes and 1,000 righthand side nodes, with sparse rate varying from 1.0, 0.5, 0.2, 0.1 to 0.01. By sparse rate, I mean there are at all
sparse_rate * lefthand_nodes * righthand_nodesnon-zero arcs.
As I need to find a maximum weight matching rather than a maximum weight perfect matching, I have to add additional 900 nodes to the lefthand side and fill the weight matrix (1000 * 1000) with zero because the common bipartite maximum weight matching algorithms I found are all prepared for perfect matching. That makes the actual sparse rate even smaller (equals 0.1 * the given sparse rate).Example 2: 1000 lefthand side nodes and 1000 righthand side nodes, with sparse rate varying from 1.0, 0.5, 0.2, 0.1 to 0.01.
Example 3: (To explain locally dense) 100 lefthand side nodes (equally divided into 10 groups L_1, L_2, ..., L_10, with 10 nodes in each group) and 1000 righthand side nodes (equally divided into 10 groups R_1, R_2, R_3, ..., R_10, with 100 nodes in each group). L_i and R_j are densely connected if i == j but sparsely connected if i != j.
I know KM(Kuhn－Munkres algorithm) can achieve O(n^3) and now it is in use. The problem is that I want to do this task faster and I can tolerate controllable loss less than 5% (that is, the result sum of weight should be no less than 95% of the optimal solution).
But in my opinion, approximation algorithms seems a bad option as the greedy algorithm (sort the arcs, and choose applicable arcs to match from maximum weight to minimum weight) achieves the best result in most cases and runs very fast (and the running time is stable).
So do any of you guys know some algorithms can practically outperform the KM algorithm? Or any other papers look promising. Suggestions are welcomed!
Following are some methods I have tried:
I have tried a linear approximation algorithm from Linear-Time Approximation for Maximum Weight Matching which is proved to achieve $O(1-\epsilon)$ in $O(m/\epsilon*\log(1/\epsilon))$ time. It seems good, but I implement it and find it preforms worse than KM in practical (for the given cases) and sometimes its results are worse than results of greedy algorithm. :(
I have trie an algorithm called csa: An efficient cost scaling algorithm for the assignment problem. This works slightly better than KM when lefthand side nodes and righthand side nodes are balanced but significantly slower than KM when unbalanced. I think the problem may come from the huge amount of zero arcs I've added.
Thanks a lot!
EDIT 2016/09/01: More precise condition, some examples added, "locally dense" explained, some other methods tried.
