Detecting Blackholes and Volcanoes in Directed Networks

In this paper, we formulate a novel problem for finding blackhole and volcano patterns in a large directed graph. Specifically, a blackhole pattern is a group which is made of a set of nodes in a way such that there are only inlinks to this group from the rest nodes in the graph. In contrast, a volcano pattern is a group which only has outlinks to the rest nodes in the graph. Both patterns can be observed in real world. For instance, in a trading network, a blackhole pattern may represent a group of traders who are manipulating the market. In the paper, we first prove that the blackhole mining problem is a dual problem of finding volcanoes. Therefore, we focus on finding the blackhole patterns. Along this line, we design two pruning schemes to guide the blackhole finding process. In the first pruning scheme, we strategically prune the search space based on a set of pattern-size-independent pruning rules and develop an iBlackhole algorithm. The second pruning scheme follows a divide-and-conquer strategy to further exploit the pruning results from the first pruning scheme. Indeed, a target directed graphs can be divided into several disconnected subgraphs by the first pruning scheme, and thus the blackhole finding can be conducted in each disconnected subgraph rather than in a large graph. Based on these two pruning schemes, we also develop an iBlackhole-DC algorithm. Finally, experimental results on real-world data show that the iBlackhole-DC algorithm can be several orders of magnitude faster than the iBlackhole algorithm, which has a huge computational advantage over a brute-force method.Comment: 18 page

Sparse Learning over Infinite Subgraph Features

We present a supervised-learning algorithm from graph data (a set of graphs) for arbitrary twice-differentiable loss functions and sparse linear models over all possible subgraph features. To date, it has been shown that under all possible subgraph features, several types of sparse learning, such as Adaboost, LPBoost, LARS/LASSO, and sparse PLS regression, can be performed. Particularly emphasis is placed on simultaneous learning of relevant features from an infinite set of candidates. We first generalize techniques used in all these preceding studies to derive an unifying bounding technique for arbitrary separable functions. We then carefully use this bounding to make block coordinate gradient descent feasible over infinite subgraph features, resulting in a fast converging algorithm that can solve a wider class of sparse learning problems over graph data. We also empirically study the differences from the existing approaches in convergence property, selected subgraph features, and search-space sizes. We further discuss several unnoticed issues in sparse learning over all possible subgraph features.Comment: 42 pages, 24 figures, 4 table

GCG: Mining Maximal Complete Graph Patterns from Large Spatial Data

Recent research on pattern discovery has progressed from mining frequent patterns and sequences to mining structured patterns, such as trees and graphs. Graphs as general data structure can model complex relations among data with wide applications in web exploration and social networks. However, the process of mining large graph patterns is a challenge due to the existence of large number of subgraphs. In this paper, we aim to mine only frequent complete graph patterns. A graph g in a database is complete if every pair of distinct vertices is connected by a unique edge. Grid Complete Graph (GCG) is a mining algorithm developed to explore interesting pruning techniques to extract maximal complete graphs from large spatial dataset existing in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data. Using a divide and conquer strategy, GCG shows high efficiency especially in the presence of large number of patterns. In this paper, we describe GCG that can mine not only simple co-location spatial patterns but also complex ones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm used to exploit the extraction of maximal complete graphs in the process of mining complex co-location patterns in large spatial dataset.Comment: 1