Exploratory Analysis of Graph Data by Leveraging Domain Knowledge

Abstract

Given the soaring amount of data being generated daily, graph mining tasks are becoming increasingly challenging, leading to tremendous demand for summarization techniques. Feature selection is a representative approach that simplifies a dataset by choosing features that are relevant to a specific task, such as classification, prediction, and anomaly detection. Although it can be viewed as a way to summarize a graph in terms of a few features, it is not well-defined for exploratory analysis, and it operates on a set of observations jointly rather than conditionally (i.e., feature selection from many graphs vs. selection for an input graph conditioned on other graphs). In this work, we introduce EAGLE (Exploratory Analysis of Graphs with domain knowLEdge), a novel method that creates interpretable, feature-based, and domain-specific graph summaries in a fully automatic way. That is, the same graph in different domains–e.g., social science and neuroscience–will be described via different EAGLE summaries, which automatically leverage the domain knowledge and expectations. We propose an optimization formulation that seeks to find an interpretable summary with the most representative features for the input graph so that it is: diverse, concise, domain-specific, and efficient. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets with up to ~1M edges and ~400 features demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of EAGLE and its benefits over existing methods. We also show how our method can be applied to various graph mining tasks, such as classification and exploratory analysis.