Adaptive Candidate Generation for Scalable Edge-discovery Tasks on Data Graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework for learnable DNF blocking schemes on attributed graphs, aiming to reduce quadratic complexity in edge-discovery tasks like entity resolution and link prediction.

Contribution

It develops a graph-theoretic formalism for DNF schemes and explores their learnability within an optimization framework for attributed graphs.

Findings

Formalism enables application to heterogeneous attributed graphs

Framework demonstrates potential for complexity reduction

Empirical case study illustrates practical principles

Abstract

Several `edge-discovery' applications over graph-based data models are known to have worst-case quadratic time complexity in the nodes, even if the discovered edges are sparse. One example is the generic link discovery problem between two graphs, which has invited research interest in several communities. Specific versions of this problem include link prediction in social networks, ontology alignment between metadata-rich RDF data, approximate joins, and entity resolution between instance-rich data. As large datasets continue to proliferate, reducing quadratic complexity to make the task practical is an important research problem. Within the entity resolution community, the problem is commonly referred to as blocking. A particular class of learnable blocking schemes is known as Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) blocking schemes, and has emerged as state-of-the art for homogeneous (i.e. same-schema) tabular data. Despite the promise of these schemes, a formalism or learning framework has not been developed for them when input data instances are generic, attributed graphs possessing both node and edge heterogeneity. With such a development, the complexity-reducing scope of DNF schemes becomes applicable to a variety of problems, including entity resolution and type alignment between heterogeneous graphs, and link prediction in networks represented as attributed graphs. This paper presents a graph-theoretic formalism for DNF schemes, and investigates their learnability in an optimization framework. We also briefly describe an empirical case study encapsulating some of the principles in this paper.