Clique (graph Theory) - Applications

Applications

The word "clique", in its graph-theoretic usage, arose from the work of Luce & Perry (1949), who used complete subgraphs to model cliques (groups of people who all know each other) in social networks. For continued efforts to model social cliques graph-theoretically, see e.g. Alba (1973), Peay (1974), and Doreian & Woodard (1994).

Many different problems from bioinformatics have been modeled using cliques. For instance, Ben-Dor, Shamir & Yakhini (1999) model the problem of clustering gene expression data as one of finding the minimum number of changes needed to transform a graph describing the data into a graph formed as the disjoint union of cliques; Tanay & Sharan (Shamir) discuss a similar biclustering problem for expression data in which the clusters are required to be cliques. Sugihara (1984) uses cliques to model ecological niches in food webs. Day & Sankoff (1986) describe the problem of inferring evolutionary trees as one of finding maximum cliques in a graph that has as its vertices characteristics of the species, where two vertices share an edge if there exists a perfect phylogeny combining those two characters. Samudrala & Moult (1998) model protein structure prediction as a problem of finding cliques in a graph whose vertices represent positions of subunits of the protein. And by searching for cliques in a protein-protein interaction network, Spirin & Mirny (2003) found clusters of proteins that interact closely with each other and have few interactions with proteins outside the cluster. Power graph analysis is a method for simplifying complex biological networks by finding cliques and related structures in these networks.

In electrical engineering, Prihar (1956) uses cliques to analyze communications networks, and Paull & Unger (1959) use them to design efficient circuits for computing partially specified Boolean functions. Cliques have also been used in automatic test pattern generation: a large clique in an incompatibility graph of possible faults provides a lower bound on the size of a test set. Cong & Smith (1993) describe an application of cliques in finding a hierarchical partition of an electronic circuit into smaller subunits.

In chemistry, Rhodes et al. (2003) use cliques to describe chemicals in a chemical database that have a high degree of similarity with a target structure. Kuhl, Crippen & Friesen (1983) use cliques to model the positions in which two chemicals will bind to each other.