The role of unique node identifiers in network computing is well understood as far as symmetry breaking is concerned. However, the unique identifiers also leak information about the computing environment - in particular, they provide some nodes with information related to the size of the network. It was recently proved that in the context of local decision, there are some decision problems such that (1) they cannot be solved without unique identifiers, and (2) unique node identifiers leak a sufficient amount of information such that the problem becomes solvable (PODC 2013). In this work we give study what is the minimal amount of information that we need to leak from the environment to the nodes in order to solve local decision problems. Our key results are related to scalar oracles @math that, for any given @math , provide a multiset @math of @math labels; then the adversary assigns the labels to the @math nodes in the network. This is a direct generalisation of the usual assumption of unique node identifiers. We give a complete characterisation of the weakest oracle that leaks at least as much information as the unique identifiers. Our main result is the following dichotomy: we classify scalar oracles as large and small, depending on their asymptotic behaviour, and show that (1) any large oracle is at least as powerful as the unique identifiers in the context of local decision problems, while (2) for any small oracle there are local decision problems that still benefit from unique identifiers.
In the context of network computing, oracles and advice commonly appear in the form of @cite_2 @cite_17 . A typical example is a , which is a labelling of the nodes so that the distance between any pair of nodes can be computed or approximated based on the labels. Other examples are that label the nodes with information that helps in finding a short path between any given source and destination. For graph problems, one could of course encode the entire solution in the advice string---hence the key question is whether a very small amount of advice helps with solving a given problem.
@cite_17 @cite_2
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The emergence of real life graphs with billions of nodes poses significant challenges for managing and querying these graphs. One of the fundamental queries submitted to graphs is the shortest distance query. Online BFS (breadth-first search) and offline pre-computing pairwise shortest distances are prohibitive in time or space complexity for billion-node graphs. In this paper, we study the feasibility of building distance oracles for billion-node graphs. A distance oracle provides approximate answers to shortest distance queries by using a pre-computed data structure for the graph. Sketch-based distance oracles are good candidates because they assign each vertex a sketch of bounded size, which means they have linear space complexity. However, state-of-the-art sketch-based distance oracles lack efficiency or accuracy when dealing with big graphs. In this paper, we address the scalability and accuracy issues by focusing on optimizing the three key factors that affect the performance of distance oracles: landmark selection, distributed BFS, and answer generation. We conduct extensive experiments on both real networks and synthetic networks to show that we can build distance oracles of affordable cost and efficiently answer shortest distance queries even for billion-node graphs. We consider how to assign labels to any undirected graph with n nodes such that, given the labels of two nodes and no other information regarding the graph, it is possible to determine the distance between the two nodes. The challenge in such a distance labeling scheme is primarily to minimize the maximum label lenght and secondarily to minimize the time needed to answer distance queries (decoding). Previous schemes have offered different trade-offs between label lengths and query time. This paper presents a simple algorithm with shorter labels and shorter query time than any previous solution, thereby improving the state-of-the-art with respect to both label length and query time in one single algorithm. Our solution addresses several open problems concerning label length and decoding time and is the first improvement of label length for more than three decades. More specifically, we present a distance labeling scheme with label size (log 3) 2 + o(n) (logarithms are in base 2) and O(1) decoding time. This outperforms all existing results with respect to both size and decoding time, including Winkler's (Combinatorica 1983) decade-old result, which uses labels of size (log 3)n and O(n log n) decoding time, and (SODA'01), which uses labels of size 11n + o(n) and O(loglog n) decoding time. In addition, our algorithm is simpler than the previous ones. In the case of integral edge weights of size at most W, we present almost matching upper and lower bounds for label sizes. For r-additive approximation schemes, where distances can be off by an additive constant r, we give both upper and lower bounds. In particular, we present an upper bound for 1-additive approximation schemes which, in the unweighted case, has the same size (ignoring second order terms) as an adjacency scheme: n 2. We also give results for bipartite graphs and for exact and 1-additive distance oracles. We study the problem of the amount of information required to draw a complete or a partial map of a graph with unlabeled nodes and arbitrarily labeled ports. A mobile agent, starting at any node of an unknown connected graph and walking in it, has to accomplish one of the following tasks: draw a complete map of the graph, i.e., find an isomorphic copy of it including port numbering, or draw a partial map, i.e., a spanning tree, again with port numbering. The agent executes a deterministic algorithm and cannot mark visited nodes in any way. None of these map drawing tasks is feasible without any additional information, unless the graph is a tree. Hence we investigate the minimum number of bits of information (minimum size of advice) that has to be given to the agent to complete these tasks. It turns out that this minimum size of advice depends on the number n of nodes or the number m of edges of the graph, and on a crucial parameter @m, called the multiplicity of the graph, which measures the number of nodes that have an identical view of the graph. We give bounds on the minimum size of advice for both above tasks. For @m=1 our bounds are asymptotically tight for both tasks and show that the minimum size of advice is very small. For @m>1 the minimum size of advice increases abruptly. In this case our bounds are asymptotically tight for topology recognition and asymptotically almost tight for spanning tree construction. Given a simple graph G=(V,E) and a set of sources S ⊆ V, denote for each node ν e V by Lν(∞) the lexicographically ordered list of distance source pairs (d(s,v),s), where s ∈ S. For integers d,k ∈ N∪ ∞ , we consider the source detection, or (S,d,k)-detection task, requiring each node v to learn the first k entries of Lν(∞) (if for all of them d(s,v) ≤ d) or all entries (d(s,v),s) ∈ Lν(∞) satisfying that d(s,v) ≤ d (otherwise). Solutions to this problem provide natural generalizations of concurrent breadth-first search (BFS) tree constructions. For example, the special case of k=∞ requires each source s ∈ S to build a complete BFS tree rooted at s, whereas the special case of d=∞ and S=V requires constructing a partial BFS tree comprising at least k nodes from every node in V. In this work, we give a simple, near-optimal solution for the source detection task in the CONGEST model, where messages contain at most O(log n) bits, running in d+k rounds. We demonstrate its utility for various routing problems, exact and approximate diameter computation, and spanner construction. For those problems, we obtain algorithms in the CONGEST model that are faster and in some cases much simpler than previous solutions. We consider vertex-labeled graphs, where each vertex v is attached with a label from a set of labels. The vertex-to-label distance query desires the length of the shortest path from the given vertex to the set of vertices with the given label. We show how to construct an oracle for a vertex-labeled planar graph, such that (O( 1 n n) ) storing space is needed, and any vertex-to-label query can be answered in (O( 1 n ) ) time with stretch 1 + e. Here, Δ is the hop-diameter of the given graph. For the case that Δ = O(logn), we construct a distance oracle that achieves (O( 1 n) ) query time, without changing space usage. A (1+e)-approximate distance oracle for a graph is a data structure that supports approximate point-to-point shortest-path-distance queries. The most relevant measures for a distance-oracle construction are: space, query time, and preprocessing time. There are strong distance-oracle constructions known for planar graphs (Thorup, JACM'04) and, subsequently, minor-excluded graphs (Abraham and Gavoille, PODC'06). However, these require Ω(e-1n lg n) space for n-node graphs. In this paper, for planar graphs, bounded-genus graphs, and minor-excluded graphs we give distance-oracle constructions that require only O(n) space. The big O hides only a fixed constant, independent of e and independent of genus or size of an excluded minor. The preprocessing times for our distance oracle are also faster than those for the previously known constructions. For planar graphs, the preprocessing time is O(nlg2 n). However, our constructions have slower query times. For planar graphs, the query time is O(e-2 lg2 n). For all our linear-space results, we can in fact ensure, for any δ > 0, that the space required is only 1 + δ times the space required just to represent the graph itself. Many real-world domains can be represented as large node-link graphs: backbone Internet routers connect with 70,000 other hosts, mid-sized Web servers handle between 20,000 and 200,000 hyperlinked documents, and dictionaries contain millions of words defined in terms of each other. Computational manipulation of such large graphs is common, but previous tools for graph visualization have been limited to datasets of a few thousand nodes. Visual depictions of graphs and networks are external representations that exploit human visual processing to reduce the cognitive load of many tasks that require understanding of global or local structure. We assert that the two key advantages of computer-based systems for information visualization over traditional paper-based visual exposition are interactivity and scalability. We also argue that designing visualization software by taking the characteristics of a target user's task domain into account leads to systems that are more effective and scale to larger datasets than previous work. This thesis contains a detailed analysis of three specialized systems for the interactive exploration of large graphs, relating the intended tasks to the spatial layout and visual encoding choices. We present two novel algorithms for specialized layout and drawing that use quite different visual metaphors. The H3 system for visualizing the hyperlink structures of web sites scales to datasets of over 100,000 nodes by using a carefully chosen spanning tree as the layout backbone, 3D hyperbolic geometry for a Focus+Context view, and provides a fluid interactive experience through guaranteed frame rate drawing. The Constellation system features a highly specialized 2D layout intended to spatially encode domain-specific information for computational linguists checking the plausibility of a large semantic network created from dictionaries. The Planet Multicast system for displaying the tunnel topology of the Internet's multicast backbone provides a literal 3D geographic layout of arcs on a globe to help MBone maintainers find misconfigured long-distance tunnels. Each of these three systems provides a very different view of the graph structure, and we evaluate their efficacy for the intended task. We generalize these findings in our analysis of the importance of interactivity and specialization for graph visualization systems that are effective and scalable. Consider an undirected weighted graph G=(V,E) with |V|=n and |E|=m, where each vertex v is assigned a label from a set L of labels. We show how to construct a compact distance oracle that can answer queries of the form: "what is the distance from v to the closest lambda-labeled node" for a given node v in V and label lambda in L. This problem was introduced by Hermelin, Levy, Weimann and Yuster [ICALP 2011] where they present several results for this problem. In the first result, they show how to construct a vertex-label distance oracle of expected size O(kn^ 1+1 k ) with stretch (4k - 5) and query time O(k). In a second result, they show how to reduce the size of the data structure to O(kn ^ 1 k ) at the expense of a huge stretch, the stretch of this construction grows exponentially in k, (2^k-1). In the third result they present a dynamic vertex-label distance oracle that is capable of handling label changes in a sub-linear time. The stretch of this construction is also exponential in k, (2 3^ k-1 +1). We manage to significantly improve the stretch of their constructions, reducing the dependence on k from exponential to polynomial (4k-5), without requiring any tradeoff regarding any of the other variables. In addition, we introduce the notion of vertex-label spanners: subgraphs that preserve distances between every node v and label lambda. We present an efficient construction for vertex-label spanners with stretch-size tradeoff close to optimal. Let G e (V, E) be an undirected graph on n vertices, and let Δ(u, v) denote the distance in G between two vertices u and v. Thorup and Zwick showed that for any positive integer t, the graph G can be preprocessed to build a data structure that can efficiently report t-approximate distance between any pair of vertices. That is, for any u, v ∈ V, the distance reported is at least Δ(u, v) and at most tΔ(u, v). The remarkable feature of this data structure is that, for t≥3, it occupies subquadratic space, that is, it does not store all-pairs distances explicitly, and still it can answer any t-approximate distance query in constant time. They named the data structure “approximate distance oracle” because of this feature. Furthermore, the trade-off between the stretch t and the size of the data structure is essentially optimal.In this article, we show that we can actually construct approximate distance oracles in expected O(n2) time if the graph is unweighted. One of the new ideas used in the improved algorithm also leads to the first expected linear-time algorithm for computing an optimal size (2, 1)-spanner of an unweighted graph. A (2, 1) spanner of an undirected unweighted graph G e (V, E) is a subgraph (V, E), E ⊆ E, such that for any two vertices u and v in the graph, their distance in the subgraph is at most 2Δ(u, v) p 1. In topology recognition, each node of an anonymous network has to deterministically produce an isomorphic copy of the underlying graph, with all ports correctly marked. This task is usually unfeasible without any a priori information. Such information can be provided to nodes as advice. An oracle knowing the network can give a (possibly different) string of bits to each node, and all nodes must reconstruct the network using this advice, after a given number of rounds of communication. During each round each node can exchange arbitrary messages with all its neighbors and perform arbitrary local computations. The time of completing topology recognition is the number of rounds it takes, and the size of advice is the maximum length of a string given to nodes.We investigate tradeoffs between the time in which topology recognition is accomplished and the minimum size of advice that has to be given to nodes. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimum size of advice that is sufficient to perform topology recognition in a given time, in the class of all graphs of size n and diameter D ? α n , for any constant α < 1 . In most cases, our bounds are asymptotically tight. Distributed distance oracles consist of a labeling scheme which assigns a label to each node and a local data structure deployed to each node. When a node v wants to know the distance to a node u, it queries its local data structure with the label of u. The data structure returns an estimated distance to u, which must be larger than the actual distance but can be overestimated. The accuracy of the distance oracle is measured by stretch, which is defined as the maximum ratio between actual distances and estimated distances over all pairs (u, v). We study the problem of the amount of information (advice) about a graph that must be given to its nodes in order to achieve fast distributed computations. The required size of the advice enables to measure the information sensitivity of a network problem. A problem is information sensitive if little advice is enough to solve the problem rapidly (i.e., much faster than in the absence of any advice), whereas it is information insensitive if it requires giving a lot of information to the nodes in order to ensure fast computation of the solution. In this paper, we study the information sensitivity of distributed graph coloring. We study the problem of the amount of information (advice) about a graph that must be given to its nodes in order to achieve fast distributed computations. The required size of the advice enables to measure the information sensitivity of a network problem. A problem is information sensitive if little advice is enough to solve the problem rapidly (i.e., much faster than in the absence of any advice), whereas it is information insensitive if it requires giving a lot of information to the nodes in order to ensure fast computation of the solution. In this paper, we study the information sensitivity of distributed graph coloring. [L. Blin, P. Fraigniaud, N. Nisse, S. Vial, Distributing chasing of network intruders, in: 13th Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity, SIROCCO, in: LNCS, vol. 4056, Springer-Verlag, 2006, pp. 70-84] introduced a new measure of difficulty for a distributed task in a network. The smallest number of bits of advice of a distributed problem is the smallest number of bits of information that has to be available to nodes in order to accomplish the task efficiently. Our paper deals with the number of bits of advice required to perform efficiently the graph searching problem in a distributed setting. In this variant of the problem, all searchers are initially placed at a particular node of the network. The aim of the team of searchers is to clear a contaminated graph in a monotone connected way, i.e., the cleared part of the graph is permanently connected, and never decreases while the search strategy is executed. Moreover, the clearing of the graph must be performed using the optimal number of searchers, i.e. the minimum number of searchers sufficient to clear the graph in a monotone connected way in a centralized setting. We show that the minimum number of bits of advice permitting the monotone connected and optimal clearing of a network in a distributed setting is @Q(nlogn), where n is the number of nodes of the network. More precisely, we first provide a labelling of the vertices of any graph G, using a total of O(nlogn) bits, and a protocol using this labelling that enables the optimal number of searchers to clear G in a monotone connected distributed way. Then, we show that this number of bits of advice is optimal: any distributed protocol requires @W(nlogn) bits of advice to clear a network in a monotone connected way, using an optimal number of searchers. We focus on large graphs where nodes have attributes, such as a social network where the nodes are labelled with each person's job title. In such a setting, we want to find subgraphs that match a user query pattern. For example, a "star" query would be, "find a CEO who has strong interactions with a Manager, a Lawyer,and an Accountant, or another structure as close to that as possible". Similarly, a "loop" query could help spot a money laundering ring. Traditional SQL-based methods, as well as more recent graph indexing methods, will return no answer when an exact match does not exist. This is the first main feature of our method. It can find exact-, as well as near-matches, and it will present them to the user in our proposed "goodness" order. For example, our method tolerates indirect paths between, say, the "CEO" and the "Accountant" of the above sample query, when direct paths don't exist. Its second feature is scalability. In general, if the query has nq nodes and the data graph has n nodes, the problem needs polynomial time complexity O(n n q), which is prohibitive. Our G-Ray ("Graph X-Ray") method finds high-quality subgraphs in time linear on the size of the data graph. Experimental results on the DLBP author-publication graph (with 356K nodes and 1.9M edges) illustrate both the effectiveness and scalability of our approach. The results agree with our intuition, and the speed is excellent. It takes 4 seconds on average fora 4-node query on the DBLP graph. We consider the problem of using a large unlabeled sample to boost performance of a learning algorit,hrn when only a small set of labeled examples is available. In particular, we consider a problem setting motivated by the task of learning to classify web pages, in which the description of each example can be partitioned into two distinct views. For example, the description of a web page can be partitioned into the words occurring on that page, and the words occurring in hyperlinks t,hat point to that page. We assume that either view of the example would be sufficient for learning if we had enough labeled data, but our goal is to use both views together to allow inexpensive unlabeled data to augment, a much smaller set of labeled examples. Specifically, the presence of two distinct views of each example suggests strategies in which two learning algorithms are trained separately on each view, and then each algorithm’s predictions on new unlabeled examples are used to enlarge the training set of the other. Our goal in this paper is to provide a PAC-style analysis for this setting, and, more broadly, a PAC-style framework for the general problem of learning from both labeled and unlabeled data. We also provide empirical results on real web-page data indicating that this use of unlabeled examples can lead to significant improvement of hypotheses in practice. *This research was supported in part by the DARPA HPKB program under contract F30602-97-1-0215 and by NSF National Young investigator grant CCR-9357793. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. TO copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and or a fee. COLT 98 Madison WI USA Copyright ACM 1998 l-58113-057--0 98 7... 5.00 92 Tom Mitchell School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 mitchell+@cs.cmu.edu Many network problems are based on fundamental relationships involving time. Consider, for example, the problems of modeling the flow of information through a distributed network, studying the spread of a disease through a population, or analyzing the reachability properties of an airline timetable. In such settings, a natural model is that of a graph in which each edge is annotated with a time label specifying the time at which its endpoints "communicated." We will call such a graph a temporal network. To model the notion that information in such a network "flows" only on paths whose labels respect the ordering of time, we call a path time-respecting if the time labels on its edges are non-decreasing. The central motivation for our work is the following question: how do the basic combinatorial and algorithmic properties of graphs change when we impose this additional temporal condition? The notion of a path is intrinsic to many of the most fundamental algorithmic problems on graphs; spanning trees, connectivity, flows, and cuts are some examples. When we focus on time-respecting paths in place of arbitrary paths, many of these problems acquire a character that is different from the traditional setting, but very rich in its own right. We provide results on two types of problems for temporal networks. First, we consider connectivity problems, in which we seek disjoint time-respecting paths between pairs of nodes. The natural analogue of Menger's Theorem for node-disjoint paths fails in general for time-respecting paths; we give a non-trivial characterization of those graphs for which the theorem does hold in terms of an excluded subdivision theorem, and provide a polynomial-time algorithm for connectivity on this class of graphs. (The problem on general graphs is NP-complete.) We then define and study the class of inference problems, in which we seek to reconstruct a partially specified time labeling of a network in a manner consistent with an observed history of information flow. Topology recognition is one of the fundamental distributed tasks in networks. Each node of an anonymous network has to deterministically produce an isomorphic copy of the underlying graph, with all ports correctly marked. This task is usually unfeasible without any a priori information. Such information can be provided to nodes as advice. An oracle knowing the network can give a possibly different string of bits to each node, and all nodes must reconstruct the network using this advice, after a given number of rounds of communication. During each round each node can exchange arbitrary messages with all its neighbors and perform arbitrary local computations. The time of completing topology recognition is the number of rounds it takes, and the size of advice is the maximum length of a string given to nodes. We investigate tradeoffs between the time in which topology recognition is accomplished and the minimum size of advice that has to be given to nodes. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimum size of advice that is sufficient to perform topology recognition in a given time, in the class of all graphs of size n and diameter D≤αn, for any constant α<1. In most cases, our bounds are asymptotically tight. More precisely, if the allotted time is D-k, where 0<k≤D, then the optimal size of advice is i¾?n 2 logn D-k+1. If the allotted time is D, then this optimal size is i¾?n logn. If the allotted time is D+k, where 0<k≤D 2, then the optimal size of advice is i¾?1+logn k. The only remaining gap between our bounds is for time D+k, where D 2<k≤D. In this time interval our upper bound remains O1+logn k, while the lower bound that holds for any time is 1. This leaves a gap if D∈ologn. Finally, we show that for time 2D+1, one bit of advice is both necessary and sufficient. Our results show how sensitive is the minimum size of advice to the time allowed for topology recognition: allowing just one round more, from D to D+1, decreases exponentially the advice needed to accomplish this task. A broad class of data, ranging from similarity networks, workflow networks to protein networks, can be modeled as graphs with data values as vertex labels. Both vertex labels and neighbors could be dirty for various reasons such as typos or erroneous reporting of results in scientific experiments. Neighborhood constraints, specifying label pairs that are allowed to appear on adjacent vertices in the graph, are employed to detect and repair erroneous vertex labels and neighbors. In this paper, we study the problem of repairing vertex labels and neighbors to make graphs satisfy neighborhood constraints. Unfortunately, the problem is generally hard, which motivates us to devise approximation methods for repairing and identify interesting special cases (star and clique constraints) that can be efficiently solved. First, we propose several label repairing approximation algorithms including greedy heuristics, contraction method and an approach combining both. The performances of algorithms are also analyzed for the special case. Moreover, we devise a cubic-time constant-factor graph repairing algorithm with both label and neighbor repairs (given degree-bounded instance graphs). Our extensive experimental evaluation on real data demonstrates the effectiveness of eliminating frauds in several types of application networks. The goal of a hub-based distance labeling scheme for a network G = (V, E) is to assign a small subset S(u) ⊆ V to each node u ∈ V, in such a way that for any pair of nodes u, v, the intersection of hub sets S(u) ∩ S(v) contains a node on the shortest uv-path. The existence of small hub sets, and consequently efficient shortest path processing algorithms, for road networks is an empirical observation. A theoretical explanation for this phenomenon was proposed by (SODA 2010) through a network parameter they called highway dimension, which captures the size of a hitting set for a collection of shortest paths of length at least r intersecting a given ball of radius 2r. In this work, we revisit this explanation, introducing a more tractable (and directly comparable) parameter based solely on the structure of shortest-path spanning trees, which we call skeleton dimension. We show that skeleton dimension admits an intuitive definition for both directed and undirected graphs, provides a way of computing labels more efficiently than by using highway dimension, and leads to comparable or stronger theoretical bounds on hub set size.