Finding k most influential edges on flow graphs

In this paper, we formulate a novel question on maximum flow queries. Specifically, this problem aims to find which k edges would have the largest impact on a maximum flow query on a network. This problem has important applications in areas like social network and network planning. We show the inapproximability of the problems and present our heuristic algorithms. Experimental evaluations are carried out on real datasets and results show that our algorithms are scalable and return high quality solutions.