Discovering correlated spatio-temporal changes in evolving graphs

Graphs provide powerful abstractions of relational data, and are widely used in fields such as network management, web page analysis and sociology. While many graph representations of data describe dynamic and time evolving relationships, most graph mining work treats graphs as static entities. Our focus in this paper is to discover regions of a graph that are evolving in a similar manner. To discover regions of correlated spatio-temporal change in graphs, we propose an algorithm called cSTAG. Whereas most clustering techniques are designed to find clusters that optimise a single distance measure, cSTAG addresses the problem of finding clusters that optimise both temporal and spatial distance measures simultaneously. We show the effectiveness of cSTAG using a quantitative analysis of accuracy on synthetic data sets, as well as demonstrating its utility on two large, real-life data sets, where one is the routing topology of the Internet, and the other is the dynamic graph of files accessed together on the 1998 World Cup official website.