Fast processing of graph queries on a large database of small and medium-sized data graphs

We propose a new way of indexing a large database of small and medium-sized graphs and processing exact subgraph matching (or subgraph isomorphism) and approximate (full) graph matching queries. Rather than decomposing a graph into smaller units (e.g., paths, trees, graphs) for indexing purposes, we represent each graph in the database by its graph signature, which is essentially a multiset. We construct a disk-based index on all the signatures via bulk loading. During query processing, a query graph is also mapped into its signature, and this signature is searched using the index by performing multiset operations. To improve the precision of exact subgraph matching, we develop a new scheme using the concept of line graphs. Through extensive evaluation on real and synthetic graph datasets, we demonstrate that our approach provides a scalable and efficient disk-based solution for a large database of small and medium-sized graphs.     

gStore: a graph-based SPARQL query engine

We address efficient processing of SPARQL queries over RDF datasets. The proposed techniques, incorporated into the gStore system, handle, in a uniform and scalable manner, SPARQL queries with wildcards and aggregate operators over dynamic RDF datasets. Our approach is graph based. We store RDF data as a large graph and also represent a SPARQL query as a query graph. Thus, the query answering problem is converted into a subgraph matching problem. To achieve efficient and scalable query processing, we develop an index, together with effective pruning rules and efficient search algorithms. We propose techniques that use this infrastructure to answer aggregation queries. We also propose an effective maintenance algorithm to handle online updates over RDF repositories. Extensive experiments confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of our solutions.     

大型网络中近似子图匹配研究

为降低噪声对近似子图匹配准确率的影响,提出一种改进的近似子图匹配方法。在预处理阶段,利用k-近邻顶点集为数据图中的每个顶点建立标签-权重向量索引。在查询过程中,基于单个近邻标签的权重距离和所有近邻标签的整体匹配程度进行两级过滤,生成顶点候选集,采用生成树匹配和图匹配的方式确定查询图在大型网络中的位置。在真实数据集上的实验结果表明,该方法具有较高的执行效率和匹配准确率。     

The exact distance to destination in undirected world

Shortest distance queries are essential not only in graph analysis and graph mining tasks but also in database applications, when a large graph needs to be dealt with. Such shortest distance queries are frequently issued by end-users or requested as a subroutine in real applications. For intensive queries on large graphs, it is impractical to compute shortest distances on-line from scratch, and impractical to materialize all-pairs shortest distances. In the literature, 2-hop distance labeling is proposed to index the all-pairs shortest distances. It assigns distance labels to vertices in a large graph in a pre-computing step off-line and then answers shortest distance queries on-line by making use of such distance labels, which avoids exhaustively traversing the large graph when answering queries. However, the existing algorithms to generate 2-hop distance labels are not scalable to large graphs. Finding an optimal 2-hop distance labeling is NP-hard, and heuristic algorithms may generate large size distance labels while still needing to pre-compute all-pairs shortest paths. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop distance labeling approach, which generates a subset of the 2-hop distance labels as index off-line. We can compute the multi-hop distance labels efficiently by avoiding pre-computing all-pairs shortest paths. In addition, our multi-hop distance labeling is small in size to be stored. To answer a shortest distance query between two vertices, we first generate the query-specific small set of 2-hop distance labels for the two vertices based on our multi-hop distance labels stored and compute the shortest distance between the two vertices based on the 2-hop distance labels generated on-line. We conducted extensive performance studies on large real graphs and confirmed the efficiency of our multi-hop distance labeling scheme.     

Hybrid query execution engine for large attributed graphs

Graphs are widely used for modeling complicated data such as social networks, bibliographical networks and knowledge bases. The growing sizes of graph databases motivate the crucial need for developing powerful and scalable graph-based query engines. We propose a SPARQL-like language, G-SPARQL, for querying attributed graphs. The language enables the expression of different types of graph queries that are of large interest in the databases that are modeled as large graph such as pattern matching, reachability and shortest path queries. Each query can combine both structural predicates and value-based predicates (on the attributes of the graph nodes/edges). We describe an algebraic compilation mechanism for our proposed query language which is extended from the relational algebra and based on the basic construct of building SPARQL queries, the Triple Pattern. We describe an efficient hybrid Memory/Disk representation of large attributed graphs where only the topology of the graph is maintained in memory while the data of the graph are stored in a relational database. The execution engine of our proposed query language splits parts of the query plan to be pushed inside the relational database (using SQL) while the execution of other parts of the query plan is processed using memory-based algorithms, as necessary. Experimental results on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the efficiency and the scalability of our approach and show that our approach outperforms native graph databases by several factors.     

基于双索引的近似子图匹配

越来越多的大型复杂网络使得图结构的研究变得日益重要,其中近似子图查询备受关注。为了提高查询效率,利用顶点的邻接关系特征为每个顶点建立索引,减少了匹配顶点的数量;并基于结构和标签对大型数据图进行划分,缩小了匹配时的搜索空间。利用离线时建立的双索引,查询时首先利用顶点间的近邻关系判定公式过滤掉大量不满足匹配关系的候选顶点,然后在一定的划分空间中进行边的匹配。真实数据集中的实验表明,与单纯的划分方法或近邻关系索引相比较,双索引机制对于查询的效率和准确率方面均有明显改善。     

基于加权SimRank的中文查询推荐研究

查询推荐是搜索引擎系统中的一项重要技术,其通过推荐更合适的查询以提高用户的搜索体验。现有方法能够找到直接通过某种属性关联的相似查询,却忽略了具有间接关联的语义相关查询。该文将用户查询及查询间直接联系建模为查询关系图,并在图结构相似度算法SimRank的基础上提出了加权SimRank (简称WSimRank)用于查询推荐。WSimRank综合考虑了查询关系图的全局信息,因而能挖掘出查询间的间接关联和语义关系。然而,WSimRank复杂度太高而难以实用,该文将WSimRank转换为一个状态层次图的遍历和计算过程,进而采用动态规划、剪枝等策略对其进行优化从而可以实际应用。在大规模真实Web搜索日志上的实验表明, WSimRank在各项评价指标上均优于SimRank和传统查询推荐方法,其MAP指标接近0.9。     

Efficient subsequence matching over large video databases

Video similarity matching has broad applications such as copyright detection, news tracking and commercial monitoring, etc. Among these applications, one typical task is to detect the local similarity between two videos without the knowledge on positions and lengths of each matched subclip pair. However, most studies so far on video detection investigate the global similarity between two short clips using a pre-defined distance function. Although there are a few works on video subsequence detection, all these proposals fail to provide an effective query processing mechanism. In this paper, we first generalize the problem of video similarity matching. Then, a novel solution called consistent keyframe matching (CKM) is proposed to solve the problem of subsequence matching based on video segmentation. CKM is designed with two goals: (1) good scalability in terms of the query sequence length and the size of video database and (2) fast video subsequence matching in terms of processing time. Good scalability is achieved by employing a batch query paradigm, where keyframes sharing the same query space are summarized and ordered. As such, the redundancy of data access is eliminated, leading to much faster video query processing. Fast subsequence matching is achieved by comparing the keyframes of different video sequences. Specifically, a keyframe matching graph is first constructed and then divided into matched candidate subgraphs. We have evaluated our proposed approach over a very large real video database. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.     

An elastic partial shape matching technique

We consider the problem of partial shape matching. We propose to transform shapes into sequences and utilize an algorithm that determines a subsequence of a target sequence that best matches a query. In the proposed algorithm we map the problem of the best matching subsequence to the problem of a cheapest path in a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The approach allows us to compute the optimal scale and translation of sequence values, which is a nontrivial problem in the case of subsequence matching. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the commonly used techniques in retrieval accuracy.     

空间关键字个性化语义近似查询方法

现有的空间关键字查询处理模式大都仅支持位置相近和文本相似匹配,但不能将语义相近但形式上不匹配的对象提供给用户;并且,当前的空间-文本索引结构也不能对空间对象中的数值属性进行处理。针对上述问题,本文提出了一种支持语义近似查询的空间关键字查询方法。首先,利用词嵌入技术对用户原始查询进行扩展,生成一系列与原始查询关键字语义相关的查询关键字;然后,提出了一种能够同时支持文本和语义匹配,并利用Skyline方法对数值属性进行处理的混合索引结构AIR-Tree;最后,利用AIR-Tree进行查询匹配,返回top-k个与查询条件最为相关的有序空间对象。实验分析和结果表明,与现有同类方法相比,本文方法具有较高的执行效率和较好的用户满意度;基于AIR-Tree索引的查询效率较IRS-Tree索引提高了3.6%,在查询结果准确率上较IR-Tree和IRS-Tree索引分别提高了10.14%和16.15%。     

一种有效的贪婪模式匹配算法

模式匹配问题是意图获得两个模式中所包含个体对象之间的语义匹配和映射,其结果表示源模式的个体对象与目标模式的个体对象之间存在特定的语义关联.它在数据库应用领域起到关键性的作用,例如数据集成、电子商务、数据仓库、XML消息交换等,特别地,它已成为元数据管理的基本问题.然而,模式匹配很大程度上依赖人工的操作,是一个费时费力的过程.模式匹配问题可以归约为一个组合优化问题:多标记图匹配问题.首先,将模式表示为多标记图,将模式匹配转换为多标记图匹配问题.其次,提出多标记图的相似性度量方法,进而提出基于多标记图相似性的模式匹配目标优化函数.最后,在这个目标函数基础上设计实现了一个贪婪匹配算法,其最显著的特点是综合多种可用的标记信息,灵活准确地获得最优的匹配结果.     

Efficient matching and indexing of graph models in content-basedretrieval

In retrieval from image databases, evaluation of similarity, based both on the appearance of spatial entities and on their mutual relationships, depends on content representation based on attributed relational graphs. This kind of modeling entails complex matching and indexing, which presently prevents its usage within comprehensive applications. In this paper, we provide a graph-theoretical formulation for the problem of retrieval based on the joint similarity of individual entities and of their mutual relationships and we expound its implications on indexing and matching. In particular, we propose the usage of metric indexing to organize large archives of graph models, and we propose an original look-ahead method which represents an efficient solution for the (sub)graph error correcting isomorphism problem needed to compute object distances. Analytic comparison and experimental results show that the proposed lookahead improves the state-of-the-art in state-space search methods and that the combined use of the proposed matching and indexing scheme permits for the management of the complexity of a typical application of retrieval by spatial arrangement     

Efficient discovery of longest-lasting correlation in sequence databases

The search for similar subsequences is a core module for various analytical tasks in sequence databases. Typically, the similarity computations require users to set a length. However, there is no robust means by which to define the proper length for different application needs. In this study, we examine a new query that is capable of returning the longest-lasting highly correlated subsequences in a sequence database, which is particularly helpful to analyses without prior knowledge regarding the query length. A baseline, yet expensive, solution is to calculate the correlations for every possible subsequence length. To boost performance, we study a space-constrained index that provides a tight correlation bound for subsequences of similar lengths and offset by intraobject and interobject grouping techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first index to support a normalized distance metric of arbitrary length subsequences. In addition, we study the use of a smart cache for disk-resident data (e.g., millions of sequence objects) and a graph processing unit-based parallel processing technique for frequently updated data (e.g., nonindexable streaming sequences) to compute the longest-lasting highly correlated subsequences. Extensive experimental evaluation on both real and synthetic sequence datasets verifies the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods.     

一种基于图结构分解的图近似查询方法研究

图近似查询能够得到与查询图近似的结果集,相比较精确查询具有更广泛的应用范围。为提高近似查询的查准率和查全率,提出一种基于图结构分解的查询算法。该算法通过对查询图和目标图进行图结构分解,对其建立图分解索引,利用查询图的最小生成树集得到满足阈值的生成树集,通过图标准编码在索引中快速定位,查找出所有可能的近似结果。实验结果表明,该算法能有效得到近似结果,提高查询速度。     

Character confidence based on N-best list for keyword spotting in online Chinese handwritten documents

In keyword spotting from handwritten documents by text query, the word similarity is usually computed by combining character similarities, which are desired to approximate the logarithm of the character probabilities. In this paper, we propose to directly estimate the posterior probability (also called confidence) of candidate characters based on the N-best paths from the candidate segmentation-recognition lattice. On evaluating the candidate segmentation-recognition paths by combining multiple contexts, the scores of the N-best paths are transformed to posterior probabilities using soft-max. The parameter of soft-max (confidence parameter) is estimated from the character confusion network, which is constructed by aligning different paths using a string matching algorithm. The posterior probability of a candidate character is the summation of the probabilities of the paths that pass through the candidate character. We compare the proposed posterior probability estimation method with some reference methods including the word confidence measure and the text line recognition method. Experimental results of keyword spotting on a large database CASIA-OLHWDB of unconstrained online Chinese handwriting demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

基于快照的大规模动态图相似节点查询算法

动态图拓扑结构演进过程中,为了量化在一定时间域内节点间联系的变化情况,定义了一种泛相似节点的概念,通过衡量其与当前节点的联系是否频繁、分布是否均匀来确定与当前节点的泛相似程度,并提出了一种基于快照的大规模动态图泛相似节点查询处理算法。具体包括:图动态演进过程的快照集表示,即演进动态图;图动态演进过程中的节点泛相似的语义及其形式化表示方式,从联系的频繁程度与分布的均匀程度对节点的相似程度进行了刻画;节点泛相似语义的矩阵表示及处理方式;针对这种语义的泛相似节点查询处理算法。真实数据集和合成数据集上的实验结果均表明算法能够处理大规模动态图上泛相似节点的查询问题,并在实际应用中运用实现。     

层次序列索引的大规模动态标签图子图查询

标签图常用于智能交通网、生物信息网等新兴领域的建模。子图查询作为图数据分析的关键问题，引起了研究者的广泛关注。对现有子图查询算法的研究发现，随着图数据规模增大且频繁更新，传统子图查询算法普遍存在查询效率低，存储开销大，忽略顶点标签信息等问题。为此，提出了一种支持大规模动态标签图子图查询的层次序列索引（Dynamic Hierarchical Sequence，DHS），该索引提取数据图中带有顶点编号的层次拓扑序列关系以实现子图查询；针对图的动态变化，提出了更新点拓扑扩展式索引维护策略，仅从局部变化顶点及边开始进行增量式更新，大大降低了重建索引造成的巨大开销；提出了基于DHS索引的子图查询方法，仅需将查询图与数据图的层次序列进行匹配即可获得候选集，并在其上利用关系匹配策略获得最终查询结果。实验证明提出的方法在保证高效查询的同时降低了索引的创建及维护时间，提高了子图查询效率。     

A parallel computational approach for similarity search using Bloom filters

Finding similar items in a large and unstructured dataset is a challenging task in many applications of data science, such as searching, indexing, and retrieval. With the increasing data volume and demand for real time responses, similarity search has gained much consideration. In this paper, a parallel computational approach for similarity search using Bloom filters (PCASSB) has been proposed, which uses Bloom filter for the representation of features of document and comparison with user's query. Query features are stored in integer query array (^IQ_A), an array of integer. The PCASSB, an approximate similarity search technique, has been implemented on graphics processing unit with compute unified device architecture as the programming platform. To compute the similarity score between query and reference dataset, Dice coefficient has been used as a baseline method. The accuracy of the results generated by PCASSB is compared with the baseline method and other state‐of‐the‐art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is quite effective in processing large number of text documents as it takes less computational time.     

Fast graph query processing with a low-cost index

This paper studies the problem of processing supergraph queries, that is, given a database containing a set of graphs, find all the graphs in the database of which the query graph is a supergraph. Existing works usually construct an index and performs a filtering-and-verification process, which still requires many subgraph isomorphism testings. There are also significant overheads in both index construction and maintenance. In this paper, we design a graph querying system that achieves both fast indexing and efficient query processing. The index is constructed by a simple but fast method of extracting the commonality among the graphs, which does not involve any costly operation such as graph mining. Our query processing has two key techniques, direct inclusion and filtering. Direct inclusion allows partial query answers to be included directly without candidate verification. Our filtering technique further reduces the candidate set by operating on a much smaller projected database. Experimental results show that our method is significantly more efficient than the existing works in both indexing and query processing, and our index has a low maintenance cost.     

An adaptive path index for XML data using the query workload

Due to its flexibility, XML is becoming the de facto standard for exchanging and querying documents over the Web. Many XML query languages such as XQuery and XPath use label paths to traverse the irregularly structured XML data. Without a structural summary and efficient indexes, query processing can be quite inefficient due to an exhaustive traversal on XML data. To overcome the inefficiency, several path indexes have been proposed in the research community. Traditional indexes generally record all label paths from the root element in XML data and are constructed with the use of data only. Such path indexes may result in performance degradation due to large sizes and exhaustive navigations for partial matching path queries which start with the self-or-descendent axis(“//”). To improve the query performance, we propose an adaptive path index for XML data (termed APEX). APEX does not keep all paths starting from the root and utilizes frequently used paths on query workloads. APEX also has a nice property that it can be updated incrementally according to the changes of query workloads. Experimental results with synthetic and real-life data sets clearly confirm that APEX improves the query processing cost typically 2–69 times compared with the traditional indexes, with the performance gap increasing with the irregularity of XML data.