  The construction of cut trees (also known as Gomory-Hu trees) for a given
graph enables the minimum-cut size of the original graph to be obtained for any
pair of vertices. Cut trees are a powerful back-end for graph management and
mining, as they support various procedures related to the minimum cut, maximum
flow, and connectivity. However, the crucial drawback with cut trees is the
computational cost of their construction. In theory, a cut tree is built by
applying a maximum flow algorithm for $n$ times, where $n$ is the number of
vertices. Therefore, naive implementations of this approach result in cubic
time complexity, which is obviously too slow for today's large-scale graphs. To
address this issue, in the present study, we propose a new cut-tree
construction algorithm tailored to real-world networks. Using a series of
experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is several orders of
magnitude faster than previous algorithms and it can construct cut trees for
billion-scale graphs.
