TopoGraph: an end-to-end framework to build and analyze graph cubes

Graphs are a fundamental structure that provides an intuitive abstraction for modeling and analyzing complex and highly interconnected data. Given the potential complexity of such data, some approaches proposed extending decision-support systems with multidimensional analysis capabilities over graphs. In this paper, we introduce TopoGraph, an end-to-end framwork for building and analyzing graph cubes. TopoGraph extends the existing graph cube models by defining new types of dimensions and measures and organizing them within a multidimensional space that guarantees multidimensional integrity constraints. This results in defining three new types of graph cubes: property graph cubes, topological graph cubes, and graph-structured cubes. Afterwards, we define the algebraic OLAP operations for such novel cubes. We implement and experimentally validate TopoGraph with different types of real-world datasets.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Efficient Structure-aware OLAP Query Processing over Large Property Graphs

Property graph model is a semantically rich model for real-world applications that represent their data as graphs, e.g., communication networks, social networks, financial transaction networks. On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) provides an important tool for data analysis by allowing users to perform data aggregation through different combinations of dimensions. For example, given a Q&A forum dataset, in order to study if there is a correlation between a poster's age and his or her post quality, one may ask what is the average age of users grouped by the post score. Another example is that, in the field of music industry, it may be interesting to ask what total sales of records are with respect to different music companies and years so as to conduct a market activity analysis. Surprisingly, current graph databases do not efficiently support OLAP aggregation queries. In most cases, such queries are transformed to a sequence of join operations, and the system computes everything from scratch. For example, Neo4j, a state-of-art graph database system, processes each OLAP query in two steps. First, it expands the nodes and edges that satisfy the given query constraint. Then it performs the aggregation over all the valid substructures returned from the first step. However, in data warehousing workloads, it is common to have repeated queries from time to time. Computing everything from scratch would be highly inefficient. Materialization and view maintenance techniques developed in traditional RDBMS have proved to be efficient for processing OLAP workloads. Following the generic materialization methodology, in this thesis we develop a structure-aware cuboid caching solution to efficiently support OLAP aggregation queries over property graphs. Structure-aware means that our solution takes both heterogeneous attributes and graph topological information into consideration. The essential idea is to precompute and materialize some views based on statistics of history workload, such that future query processing can be accelerated. We implement a prototype system on top of Neo4j. Empirical studies over real-world property graphs show that, with a reasonable space cost constraint, our solution on average achieves 15-30x speedup over native Neo4j in time efficiency

On Pattern Mining in Graph Data to Support Decision-Making

In recent years graph data models became increasingly important in both research and industry. Their core is a generic data structure of things (vertices) and connections among those things (edges). Rich graph models such as the property graph model promise an extraordinary analytical power because relationships can be evaluated without knowledge about a domain-specific database schema. This dissertation studies the usage of graph models for data integration and data mining of business data. Although a typical company's business data implicitly describes a graph it is usually stored in multiple relational databases. Therefore, we propose the first semi-automated approach to transform data from multiple relational databases into a single graph whose vertices represent domain objects and whose edges represent their mutual relationships. This transformation is the base of our conceptual framework BIIIG (Business Intelligence with Integrated Instance Graphs). We further proposed a graph-based approach to data integration. The process is executed after the transformation. In established data mining approaches interrelated input data is mostly represented by tuples of measure values and dimension values. In the context of graphs these values must be attached to the graph structure and aggregated measure values are graph attributes. Since the latter was not supported by any existing model, we proposed the use of collections of property graphs. They act as data structure of the novel Extended Property Graph Model (EPGM). The model supports vertices and edges that may appear in different graphs as well as graph properties. Further on, we proposed some operators that benefit from this data structure, for example, graph-based aggregation of measure values. A primitive operation of graph pattern mining is frequent subgraph mining (FSM). However, existing algorithms provided no support for directed multigraphs. We extended the popular gSpan algorithm to overcome this limitation. Some patterns might not be frequent while their generalizations are. Generalized graph patterns can be mined by attaching vertices to taxonomies. We proposed a novel approach to Generalized Multidimensional Frequent Subgraph Mining (GM-FSM), in particular the first solution to generalized FSM that supports not only directed multigraphs but also multiple dimensional taxonomies. In scenarios that compare patterns of different categories, e.g., fraud or not, FSM is not sufficient since pattern frequencies may differ by category. Further on, determining all pattern frequencies without frequency pruning is not an option due to the computational complexity of FSM. Thus, we developed an FSM extension to extract patterns that are characteristic for a specific category according to a user-defined interestingness function called Characteristic Subgraph Mining (CSM). Parts of this work were done in the context of GRADOOP, a framework for distributed graph analytics. To make the primitive operation of frequent subgraph mining available to this framework, we developed Distributed In-Memory gSpan (DIMSpan), a frequent subgraph miner that is tailored to the characteristics of shared-nothing clusters and distributed dataflow systems. Finally, the results of use case evaluations in cooperation with a large scale enterprise will be presented. This includes a report of practical experiences gained in implementation and application of the proposed algorithms