Many graph processing algorithms require determination of shortest-path distances between arbitrary numbers of node pairs. Since computation of exact distances between all node-pairs of a large graph, e.g., 10M nodes and up, is prohibitively expensive both in computational time and storage space, distance approximation is often used in place of exact computation. A distance oracle is a data structure that answers inter-point distance queries more efficiently than in standard O(n 2 ) in time or storage space for an n node graph, e.g., in O(nlogn). In this paper, we present a novel and scalable distance oracle that leverages the hyperbolic core of real-world large graphs for fast and scalable distance approximation via spanning trees. We show empirically that the proposed oracle significantly outperforms prior oracles on a random set of test cases drawn from public domain graph libraries. There are two sets of prior work against which we benchmark our approach. The first set, which often outperforms all other oracles, employs embedding of the graph into low dimensional Euclidean spaces with carefully constructed hyperbolic distances, but provides no guarantees on the distance estimation error. The second set leverages Gromov-type tree contraction of the graph with the additive error guaranteed not to exceed 2δ logn, where δ is the hyperbolic constant of the graph. We show that our proposed oracle 1) is significantly faster than those oracles that use hyperbolic embedding (first set) with similar approximation error and, perhaps surprisingly, 2) exhibits substantially lower average estimation error compared to Gromovlike tree contractions (second set). We substantiate our claims through numerical computations on a collection of a dozen real world networks and synthetic test cases from multiple domains, ranging in size from 10s of thousand to 10s of millions of nodes.
Empirical Work on Road Networks. In contrast to the theoretical work on general graphs, there has been considerable algorithm engineering and experimentation work on road networks for navigation applications using global positioning systems (GPS). These solutions (e.g., @cite_41 @cite_9 @cite_33 @cite_20 ) crucially rely on many specific characteristic properties of road networks such as the existence of small natural cuts, a grid-like structure, highway hierarchies, guiding the search towards the target using the latitude and longitude of the target location, etc. On other graph classes such as those from online social networks, equivalent solutions are not generally known to produce equally good approximations.
@cite_41 @cite_9 @cite_33 @cite_20
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We are witnessing increasing interests in the effective use of road networks. For example, to enable effective vehicle routing, weighted-graph models of transportation networks are used, where the weight of an edge captures some cost associated with traversing the edge, e.g., greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or travel time. It is a precondition to using a graph model for routing that all edges have weights. Weights that capture travel times and GHG emissions can be extracted from GPS trajectory data collected from the network. However, GPS trajectory data typically lack the coverage needed to assign weights to all edges. This paper formulates and addresses the problem of annotating all edges in a road network with travel cost based weights from a set of trips in the network that cover only a small fraction of the edges, each with an associated ground-truth travel cost. A general framework is proposed to solve the problem. Specifically, the problem is modeled as a regression problem and solved by minimizing a judiciously designed objective function that takes into account the topology of the road network. In particular, the use of weighted PageRank values of edges is explored for assigning appropriate weights to all edges, and the property of directional adjacency of edges is also taken into account to assign weights. Empirical studies with weights capturing travel time and GHG emissions on two road networks (Skagen, Denmark, and North Jutland, Denmark) offer insight into the design properties of the proposed techniques and offer evidence that the techniques are effective. Highway hierarchies exploit hierarchical properties inherent in real-world road networks to allow fast and exact point-to-point shortest-path queries. A fast preprocessing routine iteratively performs two steps: First, it removes edges that only appear on shortest paths close to source or target; second, it identifies low-degree nodes and bypasses them by introducing shortcut edges. The resulting hierarchy of highway networks is then used in a Dijkstra-like bidirectional query algorithm to considerably reduce the search space size without losing exactness. The crucial fact is that ‘far away’ from source and target it is sufficient to consider only high-level edges. Experiments with road networks for a continent show that using a preprocessing time of around 15 min, one can achieve a query time of around 1ms on a 2.0GHz AMD Opteron. Highway hierarchies can be combined with goal-directed search, they can be extended to answer many-to-many queries, and they can be used as a basis for other speed-up techniques (e.g., for transit-node routing and highway-node routing). Comparing two geometric graphs embedded in space is important in the field of transportation network analysis. Given street maps of the same city collected from different sources, researchers often need to know how and where they differ. However, the majority of current graph comparison algorithms are based on structural properties of graphs, such as their degree distribution or their local connectivity properties, and do not consider their spatial embedding. This ignores a key property of road networks since the similarity of travel over two road networks is intimately tied to the specific spatial embedding. Likewise, many current algorithms specific to street map comparison either do not provide quality guarantees or focus on spatial embeddings only. Motivated by road network comparison, we propose a new path-based distance measure between two planar geometric graphs that is based on comparing sets of travel paths generated over the graphs. Surprisingly, we are able to show that using paths of bounded link-length, we can capture global structural and spatial differences between the graphs. We show how to utilize our distance measure as a local signature in order to identify and visualize portions of high similarity in the maps. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation of our distance measure and its local signature on street map data from Berlin, Germany and Athens, Greece. 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.