Top-k Representative Search for Comparative Tree Summarization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for comparative hierarchical data summarization of two trees with the same topology, balancing commonality and differences using a new distance measure and an efficient greedy algorithm.

Contribution

It proposes a new framework for comparative tree summarization that handles two trees simultaneously, including a novel distance measure and an extension for different structures.

Findings

The SVDT algorithm achieves high-quality summaries with approximation guarantees.

The method effectively balances similarity and difference in summaries.

Experiments show superior efficiency and effectiveness over existing methods.

Abstract

Data summarization aims at utilizing a small-scale summary to represent massive datasets as a whole, which is useful for visualization and information sipped generation. However, most existing studies of hierarchical summarization only work on \emph{one single tree} by selecting $k$ representative nodes, which neglects an important problem of comparative summarization on two trees. In this paper, given two trees with the same topology structure and different node weights, we aim at finding $k$ representative nodes, where $k_1$ nodes summarize the common relationship between them and $k_2$ nodes highlight significantly different sub-trees meanwhile satisfying $k_1+k_2=k$. To optimize summarization results, we introduce a scaling coefficient for balancing the summary view between two sub-trees in terms of similarity and difference. Additionally, we propose a novel definition based on the Hellinger distance to quantify the node distribution difference between the sub-trees. We present a greedy algorithm SVDT to find high-quality results with approximation guaranteed in an efficient way. Furthermore, we explore an extension of our comparative summarization to handle two trees with different structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our SVDT algorithm against existing summarization competitors.