Mining Brain Networks using Multiple Side Views for Neurological Disorder Identification

Mining discriminative subgraph patterns from graph data has attracted great interest in recent years. It has a wide variety of applications in disease diagnosis, neuroimaging, etc. Most research on subgraph mining focuses on the graph representation alone. However, in many real-world applications, the side information is available along with the graph data. For example, for neurological disorder identification, in addition to the brain networks derived from neuroimaging data, hundreds of clinical, immunologic, serologic and cognitive measures may also be documented for each subject. These measures compose multiple side views encoding a tremendous amount of supplemental information for diagnostic purposes, yet are often ignored. In this paper, we study the problem of discriminative subgraph selection using multiple side views and propose a novel solution to find an optimal set of subgraph features for graph classification by exploring a plurality of side views. We derive a feature evaluation criterion, named gSide, to estimate the usefulness of subgraph patterns based upon side views. Then we develop a branch-and-bound algorithm, called gMSV, to efficiently search for optimal subgraph features by integrating the subgraph mining process and the procedure of discriminative feature selection. Empirical studies on graph classification tasks for neurological disorders using brain networks demonstrate that subgraph patterns selected by the multi-side-view guided subgraph selection approach can effectively boost graph classification performances and are relevant to disease diagnosis.Comment: in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 201

Dynamic load balancing for the distributed mining of molecular structures

In molecular biology, it is often desirable to find common properties in large numbers of drug candidates. One family of methods stems from the data mining community, where algorithms to find frequent graphs have received increasing attention over the past years. However, the computational complexity of the underlying problem and the large amount of data to be explored essentially render sequential algorithms useless. In this paper, we present a distributed approach to the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. This problem is characterized by a highly irregular search tree, whereby no reliable workload prediction is available. We describe the three main aspects of the proposed distributed algorithm, namely, a dynamic partitioning of the search space, a distribution process based on a peer-to-peer communication framework, and a novel receiverinitiated load balancing algorithm. The effectiveness of the distributed method has been evaluated on the well-known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening data set, where we were able to show close-to linear speedup in a network of workstations. The proposed approach also allows for dynamic resource aggregation in a non dedicated computational environment. These features make it suitable for large-scale, multi-domain, heterogeneous environments, such as computational grids

Loom: Query-aware Partitioning of Online Graphs

As with general graph processing systems, partitioning data over a cluster of machines improves the scalability of graph database management systems. However, these systems will incur additional network cost during the execution of a query workload, due to inter-partition traversals. Workload-agnostic partitioning algorithms typically minimise the likelihood of any edge crossing partition boundaries. However, these partitioners are sub-optimal with respect to many workloads, especially queries, which may require more frequent traversal of specific subsets of inter-partition edges. Furthermore, they largely unsuited to operating incrementally on dynamic, growing graphs. We present a new graph partitioning algorithm, Loom, that operates on a stream of graph updates and continuously allocates the new vertices and edges to partitions, taking into account a query workload of graph pattern expressions along with their relative frequencies. First we capture the most common patterns of edge traversals which occur when executing queries. We then compare sub-graphs, which present themselves incrementally in the graph update stream, against these common patterns. Finally we attempt to allocate each match to single partitions, reducing the number of inter-partition edges within frequently traversed sub-graphs and improving average query performance. Loom is extensively evaluated over several large test graphs with realistic query workloads and various orderings of the graph updates. We demonstrate that, given a workload, our prototype produces partitionings of significantly better quality than existing streaming graph partitioning algorithms Fennel and LDG

Efficient Frequent Subtree Mining Beyond Forests

A common paradigm in distance-based learning is to embed the instance space into some appropriately chosen feature space equipped with a metric and to define the dissimilarity between instances by the distance of their images in the feature space. If the instances are graphs, then frequent connected subgraphs are a well-suited pattern language to define such feature spaces. Identifying the set of frequent connected subgraphs and subsequently computing embeddings for graph instances, however, is computationally intractable. As a result, existing frequent subgraph mining algorithms either restrict the structural complexity of the instance graphs or require exponential delay between the output of subsequent patterns. Hence distance-based learners lack an efficient way to operate on arbitrary graph data. To resolve this problem, in this thesis we present a mining system that gives up the demand on the completeness of the pattern set to instead guarantee a polynomial delay between subsequent patterns. Complementing this, we devise efficient methods to compute the embedding of arbitrary graphs into the Hamming space spanned by our pattern set. As a result, we present a system that allows to efficiently apply distance-based learning methods to arbitrary graph databases. To overcome the computational intractability of the mining step, we consider only frequent subtrees for arbitrary graph databases. This restriction alone, however, does not suffice to make the problem tractable. We reduce the mining problem from arbitrary graphs to forests by replacing each graph by a polynomially sized forest obtained from a random sample of its spanning trees. This results in an incomplete mining algorithm. However, we prove that the probability of missing a frequent subtree pattern is low. We show empirically that this is true in practice even for very small sized forests. As a result, our algorithm is able to mine frequent subtrees in a range of graph databases where state-of-the-art exact frequent subgraph mining systems fail to produce patterns in reasonable time or even at all. Furthermore, the predictive performance of our patterns is comparable to that of exact frequent connected subgraphs, where available. The above method considers polynomially many spanning trees for the forest, while many graphs have exponentially many spanning trees. The number of patterns found by our mining algorithm can be negatively influenced by this exponential gap. We hence propose a method that can (implicitly) consider forests of exponential size, while remaining computationally tractable. This results in a higher recall for our incomplete mining algorithm. Furthermore, the methods extend the known positive results on the tractability of exact frequent subtree mining to a novel class of transaction graphs. We conjecture that the next natural extension of our results to a larger transaction graph class is at least as difficult as proving whether P = NP, or not. Regarding the graph embedding step, we apply a similar strategy as in the mining step. We represent a novel graph by a forest of its spanning trees and decide whether the frequent trees from the mining step are subgraph isomorphic to this forest. As a result, the embedding computation has one-sided error with respect to the exact subgraph isomorphism test but is computationally tractable. Furthermore, we show that we can leverage a partial order on the pattern set. This structure can be used to reduce the runtime of the embedding computation dramatically. For the special case of Jaccard-similarity between graph embeddings, a further substantial reduction of runtime can be achieved using min-hashing. The Jaccard-distance can be approximated using small sketch vectors that can be computed fast, again using the partial order on the tree patterns

Indexing query graphs to speedup graph query processing

Subgraph/supergraph queries although central to graph analytics, are costly as they entail the NP-Complete problem of subgraph isomorphism. We present a fresh solution, the novel principle of which is to acquire and utilize knowledge from the results of previously executed queries. Our approach, iGQ, encompasses two component subindexes to identify if a new query is a subgraph/supergraph of previously executed queries and stores related key information. iGQ comes with novel query processing and index space management algorithms, including graph replacement policies. The end result is a system that leads to significant reduction in the number of required subgraph isomorphism tests and speedups in query processing time. iGQ can be incorporated into any sub/supergraph query processing method and help improve performance. In fact, it is the only contribution that can speedup significantly both subgraph and supergraph query processing. We establish the principles of iGQ and formally prove its correctness. We have implemented iGQ and have incorporated it within three popular recent state of the art index-based graph query processing solutions. We evaluated its performance using real-world and synthetic graph datasets with different characteristics, and a number of query workloads, showcasing its benefits

Incremental characterization of RDF Triple Stores

Many semantic web applications integrate data from distributed triple stores and to be efficient, they need to know what kind of content each triple store holds in order to assess if it can contribute to its queries. We present an algorithm to build indexes summarizing the content of triple stores. We extended Depth-First Search coding to provide a canonical representation of RDF graphs and we introduce a new join operator between two graph codes to optimize the generation of an index. We provide an incremental update algorithm and conclude with tests on real datasets