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Active exploration for large graphs

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Abstract

Modern information networks, such as social networks, communication networks, and citation networks, are often characterized by very large sizes and dynamically changing structures. Common solutions to graph mining tasks (e.g., node classification) usually employ an unrestricted sampling-then-mining paradigm to reduce a large network to a manageable size, followed by subsequent mining tasks. However, real-world networks may be unaccessible at once and must be crawled progressively. This can be due to the fact that the size of the network is too large, or some privacy/legal concerns. In this paper, we propose an Active Exploration framework for large graphs, where the goal is to simultaneously carry out network sampling and node labeling in order to build a sampled network from which the trained classifier can have the maximum node classification accuracy. To achieve this goal, we consider a network as a Markov chain and compute the stationary distribution of the nodes by deriving supervised random walks. The stationary distribution helps identify specific nodes to be sampled in the next step, and the labeling process labels the most informative node which in turn strengthens the sampling of the network. To improve the scalability of active exploration for large graphs, we also propose a more efficient multi-seed algorithm that simultaneously runs multiple, parallel exploration processes, and makes joint decisions to determine which nodes are to be sampled and labeled next. The simultaneous, mutually enhanced sampling and labeling processes ensure that the final sampled network contains a maximum number of nodes directly related to the underlying mining tasks. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate that our active exploration algorithms have much better chance to include target nodes in the sampled networks than baseline methods.

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Notes

  1. www.facebook.com.

  2. www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/.

  3. www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/.

  4. www.flickr.com/photos/franckmichel/6855169886/.

  5. http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/linqs/projects/lbc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

    Meng Fang

  2. CSIRO, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Meng Fang & Jie Yin

  3. Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

    Xingquan Zhu

Authors
  1. Meng Fang
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  2. Jie Yin
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  3. Xingquan Zhu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Meng Fang.

Additional information

Responsible editor: Thomas Seidl.

Most of this research was done while Meng Fang was at the University of Technology, Sydney.

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Fang, M., Yin, J. & Zhu, X. Active exploration for large graphs. Data Min Knowl Disc 30, 511–549 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-015-0424-z

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