60 research outputs found
Network Sampling: From Static to Streaming Graphs
Network sampling is integral to the analysis of social, information, and
biological networks. Since many real-world networks are massive in size,
continuously evolving, and/or distributed in nature, the network structure is
often sampled in order to facilitate study. For these reasons, a more thorough
and complete understanding of network sampling is critical to support the field
of network science. In this paper, we outline a framework for the general
problem of network sampling, by highlighting the different objectives,
population and units of interest, and classes of network sampling methods. In
addition, we propose a spectrum of computational models for network sampling
methods, ranging from the traditionally studied model based on the assumption
of a static domain to a more challenging model that is appropriate for
streaming domains. We design a family of sampling methods based on the concept
of graph induction that generalize across the full spectrum of computational
models (from static to streaming) while efficiently preserving many of the
topological properties of the input graphs. Furthermore, we demonstrate how
traditional static sampling algorithms can be modified for graph streams for
each of the three main classes of sampling methods: node, edge, and
topology-based sampling. Our experimental results indicate that our proposed
family of sampling methods more accurately preserves the underlying properties
of the graph for both static and streaming graphs. Finally, we study the impact
of network sampling algorithms on the parameter estimation and performance
evaluation of relational classification algorithms
Graph Sample and Hold: A Framework for Big-Graph Analytics
Sampling is a standard approach in big-graph analytics; the goal is to
efficiently estimate the graph properties by consulting a sample of the whole
population. A perfect sample is assumed to mirror every property of the whole
population. Unfortunately, such a perfect sample is hard to collect in complex
populations such as graphs (e.g. web graphs, social networks etc), where an
underlying network connects the units of the population. Therefore, a good
sample will be representative in the sense that graph properties of interest
can be estimated with a known degree of accuracy. While previous work focused
particularly on sampling schemes used to estimate certain graph properties
(e.g. triangle count), much less is known for the case when we need to estimate
various graph properties with the same sampling scheme. In this paper, we
propose a generic stream sampling framework for big-graph analytics, called
Graph Sample and Hold (gSH). To begin, the proposed framework samples from
massive graphs sequentially in a single pass, one edge at a time, while
maintaining a small state. We then show how to produce unbiased estimators for
various graph properties from the sample. Given that the graph analysis
algorithms will run on a sample instead of the whole population, the runtime
complexity of these algorithm is kept under control. Moreover, given that the
estimators of graph properties are unbiased, the approximation error is kept
under control. Finally, we show the performance of the proposed framework (gSH)
on various types of graphs, such as social graphs, among others
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