Multi-relation Graph Summarization

Graph summarization is beneficial in a wide range of applications, such as visualization, interactive and exploratory analysis, approximate query processing, reducing the on-disk storage footprint, and graph processing in modern hardware. However, the bulk of the literature on graph summarization surprisingly overlooks the possibility of having edges of different types. In this article, we study the novel problem of producing summaries of multi-relation networks, i.e., graphs where multiple edges of different types may exist between any pair of nodes. Multi-relation graphs are an expressive model of real-world activities, in which a relation can be a topic in social networks, an interaction type in genetic networks, or a snapshot in temporal graphs. The first approach that we consider for multi-relation graph summarization is a two-step method based on summarizing each relation in isolation, and then aggregating the resulting summaries in some clever way to produce a final unique summary. In doing this, as a side contribution, we provide the first polynomial-time approximation algorithm based on the k-Median clustering for the classic problem of lossless single-relation graph summarization. Then, we demonstrate the shortcomings of these two-step methods, and propose holistic approaches, both approximate and heuristic algorithms, to compute a summary directly for multi-relation graphs. In particular, we prove that the approximation bound of k-Median clustering for the single relation solution can be maintained in a multi-relation graph with proper aggregation operation over adjacency matrices corresponding to its multiple relations. Experimental results and case studies (on co-authorship networks and brain networks) validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.