A completely positive formulation of the graph isomorphism problem and its positive semidefinite relaxation

Aurora and Mehta (J Comb Optim 36(3):965–1006, 2018) show that two graphs $$G_1,G_2$$ G 1 , G 2 , on n vertices each, are isomorphic if and only if the feasible region of a certain linear program, LP-GI, intersects with the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP)-polytope in $${\mathbb {R}}^{(n^4+n^2)/2}$$ R ( n 4 + n 2 ) / 2 . The linear program LP-GI in Aurora and Mehta (J Comb Optim 36(3):965–1006, 2018) is obtained by relaxing an integer linear program whose feasible points correspond to the isomorphisms between $$G_1,G_2$$ G 1 , G 2 . In this paper we take an analogous approach with the linear programs replaced with conic programs. A completely positive description of the QAP-polytope was obtained in Povh and Rendl (Discrete Optim 6(3):231–241, 2009). By adding the graph conditions to this description we get a completely positive formulation of the graph isomorphism problem. However, analogous to integer linear programs, it is NP-hard to optimize over the cone of completely positive matrices. So we relax this formulation by replacing the cone of completely positive matrices with the cone of positive semidefinite matrices. We observe that the resulting SDP is the Lovász Theta function (Lovász in IEEE Trans Inf Theory 25(1):1–7, 1979) of a graph product of $$G_1,G_2$$ G 1 , G 2 and can be efficiently computed. We provide a natural heuristic that uses the SDP to solve the graph isomorphism problem. We run our heuristic on several pairs of non-isomorphic strongly regular graphs and find the results to be encouraging. Further, by adding the non-negativity constraints to the SDP, we obtain a doubly non-negative formulation, DNN-GI. We show that if the set of optimal points in DNN-GI contains a point of rank at most 3, then the given pair of graphs must be isomorphic.