Extracting node comparison insights for the interactive exploration of property graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for automatically comparing nodes in property graphs to facilitate interactive exploration, using comparison indicators and heuristics to identify significant groupings for insights.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to node comparison in property graphs, including formal problem definition, indicator design, and heuristics for meaningful grouping.

Findings

Simple heuristics enable quick insights within minutes.

Slower heuristics provide higher quality insights.

The approach is effective on real property graph databases.

Abstract

While scoring nodes in graphs to understand their importance (e.g., in terms of centrality) has been investigated for decades, comparing nodes in property graphs based on their properties has not, to our knowledge, yet been addressed. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract comparison of nodes in property graphs, to support the interactive exploratory analysis of said graphs. We first present a way of devising comparison indicators using the context of nodes to be compared. Then, we formally define the problem of using these indicators to group the nodes so that the comparisons extracted are both significant and not straightforward. We propose various heuristics for solving this problem. Our tests on real property graph databases show that simple heuristics can be used to obtain insights within minutes while slower heuristics are needed to obtain insights of higher quality.