Top-k Durable Graph Pattern Queries on Temporal Graphs

Graphs offer a natural model for the relationships and interactions among entities, such as those occurring among users in social and cooperation networks, and proteins in biological networks. Since most such networks are dynamic, to capture their evolution over time, we assume a sequence of graph snapshots where each graph snapshot represents the state of the network at a different time instance. Given this sequence, we seek to find the top-k most durable matches of an input graph pattern query, that is, the matches that exist for the longest period of time. The straightforward way to address this problem is to apply a state-of-the-art graph pattern matching algorithm at each snapshot and then aggregate the results. However, for large networks and long sequences, this approach is computationally expensive, since all matches have to be generated at each snapshot, including those appearing only once. We propose a new approach that uses a compact representation of the sequence of graph snapshots, appropriate time indexes to prune the search space, and strategies to determine the duration of the seeking matches. Finally, we present experiments with real datasets that illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.