A Continuous Refinement Strategy for the Multilevel Computation of Vertex Separators

The Vertex Separator Problem (VSP) on a graph is the problem of finding the smallest collection of vertices whose removal separates the graph into two disjoint subsets of roughly equal size. Recently, Hager and Hungerford [1] developed a continuous bilinear programming formulation of the VSP. In this paper, we reinforce the bilinear programming approach with a multilevel scheme for learning the structure of the graph.