English

Scalable Graph Coreset Selection via Greedy Sampling

Numerical Analysis 2026-07-30 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Sampling representative nodes from large graphs is fundamental to graph signal processing and network analysis, yet existing methods require access to the full graph Laplacian, making them impractical at scale. We propose a simple and effective column-selective graph sampling algorithm based on a minimum inner product greedy selection rule. At each iteration, the algorithm accesses only a small random subset of Laplacian columns, requiring no eigendecomposition or global graph traversal, making it well-suited for large-scale graphs where the full Laplacian cannot be stored in memory. We analyze the algorithm under the stochastic block model and show that, when the degree distribution is balanced across nodes, the algorithm achieves sampling proportional to cluster size, and that the resulting mean estimate is controlled for band-limited graph signals in the Paley-Wiener space, with the error decaying as inter-cluster connectivity weakens. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.27602,
  title  = {Scalable Graph Coreset Selection via Greedy Sampling},
  author = {Zhaiming Shen and Alexander Cloninger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.27602},
  year   = {2026}
}