Approximate Homogeneous Graph Summarization

Abstract

Graph patterns are able to represent the complex structural relations among objects in many applications in various domains. The objective of graph summarization is to obtain a concise representation of a single large graph, which is interpretable and suitable for analysis. A good summary can reveal the hidden relationships between nodes in a graph. The key issue is how to construct a high-quality and representative super-graph, G_S, in which a super-node summarizes a collection of nodes based on the similarity of attribute values and neighborhood relationships associated with nodes in G, and a super-edge summarizes the edges between nodes in G that are represented by two different super-nodes in G_S. We propose an entropy-based unified model for measuring the homogeneity of the super-graph. The best summary in terms of homogeneity could be too large to explore. By using the unified model, we relax three summarization criteria to obtain an approximate homogeneous summary of reasonable size. We propose both agglomerative and divisive algorithms for approximate summarization, as well as pruning techniques and heuristics for both algorithms to save computation cost. Experimental results confirm that our approaches can efficiently generate high-quality summaries.