An Experimental Evaluation of Semidefinite Programming and Spectral Algorithms for Max Cut

Abstract

We experimentally evaluate the performance of several Max Cut approximation algorithms. In particular, we compare the results of the Goemans and Williamson algorithm using semidefinite programming with Trevisan’s algorithm using spectral partitioning. The former algorithm has a known .878 approximation guarantee whereas the latter has a .614 approximation guarantee. We investigate whether this gap in approximation guarantees is evident in practice or whether the spectral algorithm performs as well as the SDP. We also compare the performances to the standard greedy Max Cut algorithm which has a .5 approximation guarantee, two additional spectral algorithms, and a heuristic from Burer, Monteiro, and Zhang (BMZ). The algorithms are tested on Erdős–Renyi random graphs, complete graphs from TSPLIB, and real-world graphs from the Network Repository. We find, unsurprisingly, that the spectral algorithms provide a significant speed advantage over the SDP. In our experiments, the spectral algorithms and BMZ heuristic return cuts with values which are competitive with those of the SDP.