Large graphs are difficult to represent, visualize, and understand. In this
paper, we introduce "gate graph" - a new approach to perform graph
simplification. A gate graph provides a simplified topological view of the
original graph. Specifically, we construct a gate graph from a large graph so
that for any "non-local" vertex pair (distance higher than some threshold) in
the original graph, their shortest-path distance can be recovered by
consecutive "local" walks through the gate vertices in the gate graph. We
perform a theoretical investigation on the gate-vertex set discovery problem.
We characterize its computational complexity and reveal the upper bound of
minimum gate-vertex set using VC-dimension theory. We propose an efficient
mining algorithm to discover a gate-vertex set with guaranteed logarithmic
bound. We further present a fast technique for pruning redundant edges in a
gate graph. The detailed experimental results using both real and synthetic
graphs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.Comment: A short version of this paper will be published for ICDM'11, December
201