Practical and Performant Enhancements for Maximization of Algebraic Connectivity

Abstract: Long-term state estimation over graphs remains challenging as current graph estimation methods scale poorly on large, long-term graphs. To address this, our work advances a current state-of-the-art graph sparsification algorithm, maximizing algebraic connectivity (MAC). MAC is a sparsification method that preserves estimation performance by maximizing the algebraic connectivity, a spectral graph property that is directly connected to the estimation error. Unfortunately, MAC remains computationally prohibitive for online use and requires users to manually pre-specify a connectivity-preserving edge set. Our contributions close these gaps along three complementary fronts: we develop a specialized solver for algebraic connectivity that yields an average 2x runtime speedup; we investigate advanced step size strategies for MAC's optimization procedure to enhance both convergence speed and solution quality; and we propose automatic schemes that guarantee graph connectivity without requiring manual specification of edges. Together, these contributions make MAC more scalable, reliable, and suitable for real-time estimation applications.