Patent ID: 8922559

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: obtaining, by a computing device, a participation graph that represents relationships between entities; constructing an auxiliary graph based on the participation graph by at least: forming an undirected bipartite graph corresponding to the participation graph, the undirected bipartite graph connecting entities to relationships of the entities using undirected edges between vertices that represent the entities and vertices that represent the relationships; replacing the undirected edges in the undirected bipartite graph with directed edges to form a directed graph that is configured to facilitate minimization of an objective function defined for the auxiliary graph that measures a total weight of edges removed from the undirected bipartite graph to form the directed graph; assigning directional weights to the directed edges; and connecting vertices representing the entities in the directed graph to an arbitrary sink vertex to form the auxiliary graph; determining clusters by solving the objective function defined for the auxiliary graph; and utilizing the clusters determined for the auxiliary graph to ascertain clusters that solve a related objective function defined for the participation graph.