Spotting Significant Changing Subgraphs in Evolving Graphs

Abstract

Graphs are popularly used to model structural relationships between objects. In many application domains such as social networks, sensor networks and telecommunication, graphs evolve over time. In this paper, we study a new problem of discovering the subgraphs that exhibit significant changes in evolving graphs. This problem is challenging since it is hard to define changing regions that are closely related to the actual changes (i.e., additions/deletions of edges/nodes) in graphs. We formalize the problem, and design an efficient algorithm that is able to identify the changing subgraphs incrementally. Our experimental results on real datasets show that our solution is very efficient and the resultant subgraphs are of high quality.