Consensus algorithms for the generation of all maximal bicliques

We describe a new algorithm for generating all maximal bicliques (i.e. complete bipartite. not necessarily induced subgraphs) of a graph. The algorithm is inspired by, and is quite similar to. the consensus method used in propositional logic. We show that some variants of the algorithm are totally polynomial, and even incrementally polynomial. The total complexity of the most efficient variant of the algorithms presented here is polynomial in the input size. and only linear in the output size. Computational experiments demonstrate its high efficiency on randomly generated graphs with up to 2000 vertices and 20,000 edges. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.