A Measure of the Connection Strengths between Graph Vertices with Applications

We present a simple iterative strategy for measuring the connection strength between a pair of vertices in a graph. The method is attractive in that it has a linear complexity and can be easily parallelized. Based on an analysis of the convergence property, we propose a mutually reinforcing model to explain the intuition behind the strategy. The practical effectiveness of this measure is demonstrated through several combinatorial optimization problems on graphs and hypergraphs.