Adding regular expressions to graph reachability and pattern queries

Abstract—It is increasingly common to find graphs in which edges bear different types, indicating a variety of relationships. For such graphs we propose a class of reachability queries and a class of graph patterns, in which an edge is specified with a regular expression of a certain form, expressing the connectivity in a data graph via edges of various types. In addition, we define graph pattern matching based on a revised notion of graph simulation. On graphs in emerging applications such as social networks, we show that these queries are capable of finding more sensible information than their traditional counterparts. Better still, their increased expressive power does not come with extra complexity. Indeed, (1) we investigate their containment and minimization problems, and show that these fundamental problems are in quadratic time for reachability queries and are in cubic time for pattern queries. (2) We develop an algorithm for answering reachability queries, in quadratic time as for their traditional counterpart. (3) We provide two cubic-time algorithms for evaluating graph pattern queries based on extended graph simulation, as opposed to the NP-completeness of graph pattern matching via subgraph isomorphism. (4) The effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of these algorithms are experimentally verified using real-life data and synthetic data. I

Towards Efficient Path Query on Social Network with Hybrid RDF Management

The scalability and exibility of Resource Description Framework(RDF) model make it ideally suited for representing online social networks(OSN). One basic operation in OSN is to find chains of relations,such as k-Hop friends. Property path query in SPARQL can express this type of operation, but its implementation suffers from performance problem considering the ever growing data size and complexity of OSN.In this paper, we present a main memory/disk based hybrid RDF data management framework for efficient property path query. In this hybrid framework, we realize an efficient in-memory algebra operator for property path query using graph traversal, and estimate the cost of this operator to cooperate with existing cost-based optimization. Experiments on benchmark and real dataset demonstrated that our approach can achieve a good tradeoff between data load expense and online query performance

Context-Free Path Querying by Matrix Multiplication

Graph data models are widely used in many areas, for example, bioinformatics, graph databases. In these areas, it is often required to process queries for large graphs. Some of the most common graph queries are navigational queries. The result of query evaluation is a set of implicit relations between nodes of the graph, i.e. paths in the graph. A natural way to specify these relations is by specifying paths using formal grammars over the alphabet of edge labels. An answer to a context-free path query in this approach is usually a set of triples (A, m, n) such that there is a path from the node m to the node n, whose labeling is derived from a non-terminal A of the given context-free grammar. This type of queries is evaluated using the relational query semantics. Another example of path query semantics is the single-path query semantics which requires presenting a single path from the node m to the node n, whose labeling is derived from a non-terminal A for all triples (A, m, n) evaluated using the relational query semantics. There is a number of algorithms for query evaluation which use these semantics but all of them perform poorly on large graphs. One of the most common technique for efficient big data processing is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform computations, but these algorithms do not allow to use this technique efficiently. In this paper, we show how the context-free path query evaluation using these query semantics can be reduced to the calculation of the matrix transitive closure. Also, we propose an algorithm for context-free path query evaluation which uses relational query semantics and is based on matrix operations that make it possible to speed up computations by using a GPU.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, 2 table

A Trichotomy for Regular Simple Path Queries on Graphs

Regular path queries (RPQs) select nodes connected by some path in a graph. The edge labels of such a path have to form a word that matches a given regular expression. We investigate the evaluation of RPQs with an additional constraint that prevents multiple traversals of the same nodes. Those regular simple path queries (RSPQs) find several applications in practice, yet they quickly become intractable, even for basic languages such as (aa)* or a*ba*. In this paper, we establish a comprehensive classification of regular languages with respect to the complexity of the corresponding regular simple path query problem. More precisely, we identify the fragment that is maximal in the following sense: regular simple path queries can be evaluated in polynomial time for every regular language L that belongs to this fragment and evaluation is NP-complete for languages outside this fragment. We thus fully characterize the frontier between tractability and intractability for RSPQs, and we refine our results to show the following trichotomy: Evaluations of RSPQs is either AC0, NL-complete or NP-complete in data complexity, depending on the regular language L. The fragment identified also admits a simple characterization in terms of regular expressions. Finally, we also discuss the complexity of the following decision problem: decide, given a language L, whether finding a regular simple path for L is tractable. We consider several alternative representations of L: DFAs, NFAs or regular expressions, and prove that this problem is NL-complete for the first representation and PSPACE-complete for the other two. As a conclusion we extend our results from edge-labeled graphs to vertex-labeled graphs and vertex-edge labeled graphs.Comment: 15 pages, conference submissio

Conditional Reliability in Uncertain Graphs

Network reliability is a well-studied problem that requires to measure the probability that a target node is reachable from a source node in a probabilistic (or uncertain) graph, i.e., a graph where every edge is assigned a probability of existence. Many approaches and problem variants have been considered in the literature, all assuming that edge-existence probabilities are fixed. Nevertheless, in real-world graphs, edge probabilities typically depend on external conditions. In metabolic networks a protein can be converted into another protein with some probability depending on the presence of certain enzymes. In social influence networks the probability that a tweet of some user will be re-tweeted by her followers depends on whether the tweet contains specific hashtags. In transportation networks the probability that a network segment will work properly or not might depend on external conditions such as weather or time of the day. In this paper we overcome this limitation and focus on conditional reliability, that is assessing reliability when edge-existence probabilities depend on a set of conditions. In particular, we study the problem of determining the k conditions that maximize the reliability between two nodes. We deeply characterize our problem and show that, even employing polynomial-time reliability-estimation methods, it is NP-hard, does not admit any PTAS, and the underlying objective function is non-submodular. We then devise a practical method that targets both accuracy and efficiency. We also study natural generalizations of the problem with multiple source and target nodes. An extensive empirical evaluation on several large, real-life graphs demonstrates effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methods.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Subgraph Pattern Matching over Uncertain Graphs with Identity Linkage Uncertainty

There is a growing need for methods which can capture uncertainties and answer queries over graph-structured data. Two common types of uncertainty are uncertainty over the attribute values of nodes and uncertainty over the existence of edges. In this paper, we combine those with identity uncertainty. Identity uncertainty represents uncertainty over the mapping from objects mentioned in the data, or references, to the underlying real-world entities. We propose the notion of a probabilistic entity graph (PEG), a probabilistic graph model that defines a distribution over possible graphs at the entity level. The model takes into account node attribute uncertainty, edge existence uncertainty, and identity uncertainty, and thus enables us to systematically reason about all three types of uncertainties in a uniform manner. We introduce a general framework for constructing a PEG given uncertain data at the reference level and develop highly efficient algorithms to answer subgraph pattern matching queries in this setting. Our algorithms are based on two novel ideas: context-aware path indexing and reduction by join-candidates, which drastically reduce the query search space. A comprehensive experimental evaluation shows that our approach outperforms baseline implementations by orders of magnitude