Graph pattern matching on social network analysis

Abstract

Graph pattern matching is fundamental to social network analysis. Its effectiveness for identifying social communities and social positions, making recommendations and so on has been repeatedly demonstrated. However, the social network analysis raises new challenges to graph pattern matching. As real-life social graphs are typically large, it is often prohibitively expensive to conduct graph pattern matching over such large graphs, e.g., NP-complete for subgraph isomorphism, cubic time for bounded simulation, and quadratic time for simulation. These hinder the applicability of graph pattern matching on social network analysis. In response to these challenges, the thesis presents a series of effective techniques for querying large, dynamic, and distributively stored social networks. First of all, we propose a notion of query preserving graph compression, to compress large social graphs relative to a class Q of queries. We then develop both batch and incremental compression strategies for two commonly used pattern queries. Via both theoretical analysis and experimental studies, we show that (1) using compressed graphs Gr benefits graph pattern matching dramatically; and (2) the computation of Gr as well as its maintenance can be processed efficiently. Secondly, we investigate the distributed graph pattern matching problem, and explore parallel computation for graph pattern matching. We show that our techniques possess following performance guarantees: (1) each site is visited only once; (2) the total network traffic is independent of the size of G; and (3) the response time is decided by the size of largest fragment of G rather than the size of entire G. Furthermore, we show how these distributed algorithms can be implemented in the MapReduce framework. Thirdly, we study the problem of answering graph pattern matching using views since view based techniques have proven an effective technique for speeding up query evaluation. We propose a notion of pattern containment to characterise graph pattern matching using views, and introduce efficient algorithms to answer graph pattern matching using views. Moreover, we identify three problems related to graph pattern containment, and provide efficient algorithms for containment checking (approximation when the problem is intractable). Fourthly, we revise graph pattern matching by supporting a designated output node, which we treat as “query focus”. We then introduce algorithms for computing the top-k relevant matches w.r.t. the output node for both acyclic and cyclic pattern graphs, respectively, with early termination property. Furthermore, we investigate the diversified top-k matching problem, and develop an approximation algorithm with performance guarantee and a heuristic algorithm with early termination property. Finally, we introduce an expert search system, called ExpFinder, for large and dynamic social networks. ExpFinder identifies top-k experts in social networks by graph pattern matching, and copes with the sheer size of real-life social networks by integrating incremental graph pattern matching, query preserving compression and top-k matching computation. In particular, we also introduce bounded (resp. unbounded) incremental algorithms to maintain the weighted landmark vectors which are used for incremental maintenance for cached results.