arXiv subjects

Xiaokui Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaokui Xiao.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

PRSim: Sublinear Time SimRank Computation on Large Power-Law Graphs

{\it SimRank} is a classic measure of the similarities of nodes in a graph. Given a node $u$ in graph $G =(V, E)$, a {\em single-source SimRank query} returns the SimRank similarities $s(u, v)$ between node $u$ and each node $v \in V$. This type of queries has numerous applications in web search and social networks analysis, such as link prediction, web mining, and spam detection. Existing methods for single-source SimRank queries, however, incur query cost at least linear to the number of nodes $n$, which renders them inapplicable for real-time and interactive analysis. { This paper proposes \prsim, an algorithm that exploits the structure of graphs to efficiently answer single-source SimRank queries. \prsim uses an index of size $O(m)$, where $m$ is the number of edges in the graph, and guarantees a query time that depends on the {\em reverse PageRank} distribution of the input graph. In particular, we prove that \prsim runs in sub-linear time if the degree distribution of the input graph follows the power-law distribution, a property possessed by many real-world graphs. Based on the theoretical analysis, we show that the empirical query time of all existing SimRank algorithms also depends on the reverse PageRank distribution of the graph.} Finally, we present the first experimental study that evaluates the absolute errors of various SimRank algorithms on large graphs, and we show that \prsim outperforms the state of the art in terms of query time, accuracy, index size, and scalability.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Efficient Estimation of Heat Kernel PageRank for Local Clustering

Given an undirected graph G and a seed node s, the local clustering problem aims to identify a high-quality cluster containing s in time roughly proportional to the size of the cluster, regardless of the size of G. This problem finds numerous applications on large-scale graphs. Recently, heat kernel PageRank (HKPR), which is a measure of the proximity of nodes in graphs, is applied to this problem and found to be more efficient compared with prior methods. However, existing solutions for computing HKPR either are prohibitively expensive or provide unsatisfactory error approximation on HKPR values, rendering them impractical especially on billion-edge graphs. In this paper, we present TEA and TEA+, two novel local graph clustering algorithms based on HKPR, to address the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, these algorithms provide non-trivial theoretical guarantees in relative error of HKPR values and the time complexity. The basic idea is to utilize deterministic graph traversal to produce a rough estimation of exact HKPR vector, and then exploit Monte-Carlo random walks to refine the results in an optimized and non-trivial way. In particular, TEA+ offers practical efficiency and effectiveness due to non-trivial optimizations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TEA+ outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by more than four times on most benchmark datasets in terms of computational time when achieving the same clustering quality, and in particular, is an order of magnitude faster on large graphs including the widely studied Twitter and Friendster datasets.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

GraphMP: I/O-Efficient Big Graph Analytics on a Single Commodity Machine

Recent studies showed that single-machine graph processing systems can be as highly competitive as cluster-based approaches on large-scale problems. While several out-of-core graph processing systems and computation models have been proposed, the high disk I/O overhead could significantly reduce performance in many practical cases. In this paper, we propose GraphMP to tackle big graph analytics on a single machine. GraphMP achieves low disk I/O overhead with three techniques. First, we design a vertex-centric sliding window (VSW) computation model to avoid reading and writing vertices on disk. Second, we propose a selective scheduling method to skip loading and processing unnecessary edge shards on disk. Third, we use a compressed edge cache mechanism to fully utilize the available memory of a machine to reduce the amount of disk accesses for edges. Extensive evaluations have shown that GraphMP could outperform existing single-machine out-of-core systems such as GraphChi, X-Stream and GridGraph by up to 51, and can be as highly competitive as distributed graph engines like Pregel+, PowerGraph and Chaos.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

ProbeSim: Scalable Single-Source and Top-k SimRank Computations on Dynamic Graphs

Single-source and top-$k$ SimRank queries are two important types of similarity search in graphs with numerous applications in web mining, social network analysis, spam detection, etc. A plethora of techniques have been proposed for these two types of queries, but very few can efficiently support similarity search over large dynamic graphs, due to either significant preprocessing time or large space overheads. This paper presents ProbeSim, an index-free algorithm for single-source and top-$k$ SimRank queries that provides a non-trivial theoretical guarantee in the absolute error of query results. ProbeSim estimates SimRank similarities without precomputing any indexing structures, and thus can naturally support real-time SimRank queries on dynamic graphs. Besides the theoretical guarantee, ProbeSim also offers satisfying practical efficiency and effectiveness due to several non-trivial optimizations. We conduct extensive experiments on a number of benchmark datasets, which demonstrate that our solutions significantly outperform the existing methods in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Notably, our experiments include the first empirical study that evaluates the effectiveness of SimRank algorithms on graphs with billion edges, using the idea of pooling.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2018

Privacy-preserving Stochastic Gradual Learning

It is challenging for stochastic optimizations to handle large-scale sensitive data safely. Recently, Duchi et al. proposed private sampling strategy to solve privacy leakage in stochastic optimizations. However, this strategy leads to robustness degeneration, since this strategy is equal to the noise injection on each gradient, which adversely affects updates of the primal variable. To address this challenge, we introduce a robust stochastic optimization under the framework of local privacy, which is called Privacy-pREserving StochasTIc Gradual lEarning (PRESTIGE). PRESTIGE bridges private updates of the primal variable (by private sampling) with the gradual curriculum learning (CL). Specifically, the noise injection leads to the issue of label noise, but the robust learning process of CL can combat with label noise. Thus, PRESTIGE yields "private but robust" updates of the primal variable on the private curriculum, namely an reordered label sequence provided by CL. In theory, we reveal the convergence rate and maximum complexity of PRESTIGE. Empirical results on six datasets show that, PRESTIGE achieves a good tradeoff between privacy preservation and robustness over baselines.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Millionaire: A Hint-guided Approach for Crowdsourcing

Modern machine learning is migrating to the era of complex models, which requires a plethora of well-annotated data. While crowdsourcing is a promising tool to achieve this goal, existing crowdsourcing approaches barely acquire a sufficient amount of high-quality labels. In this paper, motivated by the "Guess-with-Hints" answer strategy from the Millionaire game show, we introduce the hint-guided approach into crowdsourcing to deal with this challenge. Our approach encourages workers to get help from hints when they are unsure of questions. Specifically, we propose a hybrid-stage setting, consisting of the main stage and the hint stage. When workers face any uncertain question on the main stage, they are allowed to enter the hint stage and look up hints before making any answer. A unique payment mechanism that meets two important design principles for crowdsourcing is developed. Besides, the proposed mechanism further encourages high-quality workers less using hints, which helps identify and assigns larger possible payment to them. Experiments are performed on Amazon Mechanical Turk, which show that our approach ensures a sufficient number of high-quality labels with low expenditure and detects high-quality workers.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2017

Cost-Effective Seed Selection in Online Social Networks

We study the min-cost seed selection problem in online social networks, where the goal is to select a set of seed nodes with the minimum total cost such that the expected number of influenced nodes in the network exceeds a predefined threshold. We propose several algorithms that outperform the previous studies both on the theoretical approximation ratios and on the experimental performance. Under the case where the nodes have heterogeneous costs, our algorithms are the first bi- criteria approximation algorithms with polynomial running time and provable logarithmic performance bounds using a general contagion model. Under the case where the users have uniform costs, our algorithms achieve logarithmic approximation ratio and provable time complexity which is smaller than that of existing algorithms in orders of magnitude. We conduct extensive experiments using real social networks. The experimental results show that, our algorithms significantly outperform the existing algorithms both on the total cost and on the running time, and also scale well to billion-scale networks.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2017

GraphH: High Performance Big Graph Analytics in Small Clusters

It is common for real-world applications to analyze big graphs using distributed graph processing systems. Popular in-memory systems require an enormous amount of resources to handle big graphs. While several out-of-core approaches have been proposed for processing big graphs on disk, the high disk I/O overhead could significantly reduce performance. In this paper, we propose GraphH to enable high-performance big graph analytics in small clusters. Specifically, we design a two-stage graph partition scheme to evenly divide the input graph into partitions, and propose a GAB (Gather-Apply-Broadcast) computation model to make each worker process a partition in memory at a time. We use an edge cache mechanism to reduce the disk I/O overhead, and design a hybrid strategy to improve the communication performance. GraphH can efficiently process big graphs in small clusters or even a single commodity server. Extensive evaluations have shown that GraphH could be up to 7.8x faster compared to popular in-memory systems, such as Pregel+ and PowerGraph when processing generic graphs, and more than 100x faster than recently proposed out-of-core systems, such as GraphD and Chaos when processing big graphs.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2017

GraphMP: An Efficient Semi-External-Memory Big Graph Processing System on a Single Machine

Recent studies showed that single-machine graph processing systems can be as highly competitive as cluster-based approaches on large-scale problems. While several out-of-core graph processing systems and computation models have been proposed, the high disk I/O overhead could significantly reduce performance in many practical cases. In this paper, we propose GraphMP to tackle big graph analytics on a single machine. GraphMP achieves low disk I/O overhead with three techniques. First, we design a vertex-centric sliding window (VSW) computation model to avoid reading and writing vertices on disk. Second, we propose a selective scheduling method to skip loading and processing unnecessary edge shards on disk. Third, we use a compressed edge cache mechanism to fully utilize the available memory of a machine to reduce the amount of disk accesses for edges. Extensive evaluations have shown that GraphMP could outperform state-of-the-art systems such as GraphChi, X-Stream and GridGraph by 31.6x, 54.5x and 23.1x respectively, when running popular graph applications on a billion-vertex graph.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2017

Refutations on "Debunking the Myths of Influence Maximization: An In-Depth Benchmarking Study"

In a recent SIGMOD paper titled "Debunking the Myths of Influence Maximization: An In-Depth Benchmarking Study", Arora et al. [1] undertake a performance benchmarking study of several well-known algorithms for influence maximization. In the process, they contradict several published results, and claim to have unearthed and debunked several "myths" that existed around the research of influence maximization. It is the goal of this article to examine their claims objectively and critically, and refute the erroneous ones. Our investigation discovers that first, the overall experimental methodology in Arora et al. [1] is flawed and leads to scientifically incorrect conclusions. Second, the paper [1] is riddled with issues specific to a variety of influence maximization algorithms, including buggy experiments, and draws many misleading conclusions regarding those algorithms. Importantly, they fail to appreciate the trade-off between running time and solution quality, and did not incorporate it correctly in their experimental methodology. In this article, we systematically point out the issues present in [1] and refute 11 of their misclaims.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2016

Recursive Neural Conditional Random Fields for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

In aspect-based sentiment analysis, extracting aspect terms along with the opinions being expressed from user-generated content is one of the most important subtasks. Previous studies have shown that exploiting connections between aspect and opinion terms is promising for this task. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model that integrates recursive neural networks and conditional random fields into a unified framework for explicit aspect and opinion terms co-extraction. The proposed model learns high-level discriminative features and double propagate information between aspect and opinion terms, simultaneously. Moreover, it is flexible to incorporate hand-crafted features into the proposed model to further boost its information extraction performance. Experimental results on the SemEval Challenge 2014 dataset show the superiority of our proposed model over several baseline methods as well as the winning systems of the challenge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Collecting and Analyzing Data from Smart Device Users with Local Differential Privacy

Organizations with a large user base, such as Samsung and Google, can potentially benefit from collecting and mining users' data. However, doing so raises privacy concerns, and risks accidental privacy breaches with serious consequences. Local differential privacy (LDP) techniques address this problem by only collecting randomized answers from each user, with guarantees of plausible deniability; meanwhile, the aggregator can still build accurate models and predictors by analyzing large amounts of such randomized data. So far, existing LDP solutions either have severely restricted functionality, or focus mainly on theoretical aspects such as asymptotical bounds rather than practical usability and performance. Motivated by this, we propose Harmony, a practical, accurate and efficient system for collecting and analyzing data from smart device users, while satisfying LDP. Harmony applies to multi-dimensional data containing both numerical and categorical attributes, and supports both basic statistics (e.g., mean and frequency estimates), and complex machine learning tasks (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression and SVM classification). Experiments using real data confirm Harmony's effectiveness.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2016

SLING: A Near-Optimal Index Structure for SimRank

SimRank is a similarity measure for graph nodes that has numerous applications in practice. Scalable SimRank computation has been the subject of extensive research for more than a decade, and yet, none of the existing solutions can efficiently derive SimRank scores on large graphs with provable accuracy guarantees. In particular, the state-of-the-art solution requires up to a few seconds to compute a SimRank score in million-node graphs, and does not offer any worst-case assurance in terms of the query error. This paper presents SLING, an efficient index structure for SimRank computation. SLING guarantees that each SimRank score returned has at most $\varepsilon$ additive error, and it answers any single-pair and single-source SimRank queries in $O(1/\varepsilon)$ and $O(n/\varepsilon)$ time, respectively. These time complexities are near-optimal, and are significantly better than the asymptotic bounds of the most recent approach. Furthermore, SLING requires only $O(n/\varepsilon)$ space (which is also near-optimal in an asymptotic sense) and $O(m/\varepsilon + n\log \frac{n}δ/\varepsilon^2)$ pre-computation time, where $δ$ is the failure probability of the preprocessing algorithm. We experimentally evaluate SLING with a variety of real-world graphs with up to several millions of nodes. Our results demonstrate that SLING is up to $10000$ times (resp. $110$ times) faster than competing methods for single-pair (resp. single-source) SimRank queries, at the cost of higher space overheads.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2016

PrivTree: A Differentially Private Algorithm for Hierarchical Decompositions

Given a set D of tuples defined on a domain Omega, we study differentially private algorithms for constructing a histogram over Omega to approximate the tuple distribution in D. Existing solutions for the problem mostly adopt a hierarchical decomposition approach, which recursively splits Omega into sub-domains and computes a noisy tuple count for each sub-domain, until all noisy counts are below a certain threshold. This approach, however, requires that we (i) impose a limit h on the recursion depth in the splitting of Omega and (ii) set the noise in each count to be proportional to h. This leads to inferior data utility due to the following dilemma: if we use a small h, then the resulting histogram would be too coarse-grained to provide an accurate approximation of data distribution; meanwhile, a large h would yield a fine-grained histogram, but its quality would be severely degraded by the increased amount of noise in the tuple counts. To remedy the deficiency of existing solutions, we present PrivTree, a histogram construction algorithm that also applies hierarchical decomposition but features a crucial (and somewhat surprising) improvement: when deciding whether or not to split a sub-domain, the amount of noise required in the corresponding tuple count is independent of the recursive depth. This enables PrivTree to adaptively generate high-quality histograms without even asking for a pre-defined threshold on the depth of sub-domain splitting. As concrete examples, we demonstrate an application of PrivTree in modelling spatial data, and show that it can also be extended to handle sequence data (where the decision in sub-domain splitting is not based on tuple counts but a more sophisticated measure). Our experiments on a variety of real datasets show that PrivTree significantly outperforms the states of the art in terms of data utility.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2015

Optimizing Batch Linear Queries under Exact and Approximate Differential Privacy

Differential privacy is a promising privacy-preserving paradigm for statistical query processing over sensitive data. It works by injecting random noise into each query result, such that it is provably hard for the adversary to infer the presence or absence of any individual record from the published noisy results. The main objective in differentially private query processing is to maximize the accuracy of the query results, while satisfying the privacy guarantees. Previous work, notably \cite{LHR+10}, has suggested that with an appropriate strategy, processing a batch of correlated queries as a whole achieves considerably higher accuracy than answering them individually. However, to our knowledge there is currently no practical solution to find such a strategy for an arbitrary query batch; existing methods either return strategies of poor quality (often worse than naive methods) or require prohibitively expensive computations for even moderately large domains. Motivated by this, we propose low-rank mechanism (LRM), the first practical differentially private technique for answering batch linear queries with high accuracy. LRM works for both exact (i.e., $ε$-) and approximate (i.e., ($ε$, $δ$)-) differential privacy definitions. We derive the utility guarantees of LRM, and provide guidance on how to set the privacy parameters given the user's utility expectation. Extensive experiments using real data demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art query processing solutions under differential privacy, by large margins.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2014

Influence Maximization: Near-Optimal Time Complexity Meets Practical Efficiency

Given a social network G and a constant k, the influence maximization problem asks for k nodes in G that (directly and indirectly) influence the largest number of nodes under a pre-defined diffusion model. This problem finds important applications in viral marketing, and has been extensively studied in the literature. Existing algorithms for influence maximization, however, either trade approximation guarantees for practical efficiency, or vice versa. In particular, among the algorithms that achieve constant factor approximations under the prominent independent cascade (IC) model or linear threshold (LT) model, none can handle a million-node graph without incurring prohibitive overheads. This paper presents TIM, an algorithm that aims to bridge the theory and practice in influence maximization. On the theory side, we show that TIM runs in O((k+\ell) (n+m) \log n / ε^2) expected time and returns a (1-1/e-ε)-approximate solution with at least 1 - n^{-\ell} probability. The time complexity of TIM is near-optimal under the IC model, as it is only a \log n factor larger than the Ω(m + n) lower-bound established in previous work (for fixed k, \ell, and ε). Moreover, TIM supports the triggering model, which is a general diffusion model that includes both IC and LT as special cases. On the practice side, TIM incorporates novel heuristics that significantly improve its empirical efficiency without compromising its asymptotic performance. We experimentally evaluate TIM with the largest datasets ever tested in the literature, and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions (with approximation guarantees) by up to four orders of magnitude in terms of running time. In particular, when k = 50, ε= 0.2, and \ell = 1, TIM requires less than one hour on a commodity machine to process a network with 41.6 million nodes and 1.4 billion edges.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

Efficient Single-Source Shortest Path and Distance Queries on Large Graphs

This paper investigates two types of graph queries: {\em single source distance (SSD)} queries and {\em single source shortest path (SSSP)} queries. Given a node $v$ in a graph $G$, an SSD query from $v$ asks for the distance from $v$ to any other node in $G$, while an SSSP query retrieves the shortest path from $v$ to any other node. These two types of queries are fundamental building blocks of numerous graph algorithms, and they find important applications in graph analysis, especially in the computation of graph measures. Most of the existing solutions for SSD and SSSP queries, however, require that the input graph fits in the main memory, which renders them inapplicable for the massive disk-resident graphs commonly used in web and social applications. The only exceptions are a few techniques that are designed to be I/O efficient, but they all focus on undirected and/or unweighted graphs, and they only offer sub-optimal query efficiency. To address the deficiency of existing work, this paper presents {\em Highways-on-Disk (HoD)}, a disk-based index that supports both SSD and SSSP queries on directed and weighted graphs. The key idea of HoD is to augment the input graph with a set of auxiliary edges, and exploit them during query processing to reduce I/O and computation costs. We experimentally evaluate HoD on both directed and undirected real-world graphs with up to billions of nodes and edges, and we demonstrate that HoD significantly outperforms alternative solutions in terms of query efficiency.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2013

Shortest Path and Distance Queries on Road Networks: Towards Bridging Theory and Practice

Given two locations $s$ and $t$ in a road network, a distance query returns the minimum network distance from $s$ to $t$, while a shortest path query computes the actual route that achieves the minimum distance. These two types of queries find important applications in practice, and a plethora of solutions have been proposed in past few decades. The existing solutions, however, are optimized for either practical or asymptotic performance, but not both. In particular, the techniques with enhanced practical efficiency are mostly heuristic-based, and they offer unattractive worst-case guarantees in terms of space and time. On the other hand, the methods that are worst-case efficient often entail prohibitive preprocessing or space overheads, which render them inapplicable for the large road networks (with millions of nodes) commonly used in modern map applications. This paper presents {\em Arterial Hierarchy (AH)}, an index structure that narrows the gap between theory and practice in answering shortest path and distance queries on road networks. On the theoretical side, we show that, under a realistic assumption, AH answers any distance query in $\tilde{O}(\log \r)$ time, where $\r = d_{max}/d_{min}$, and $d_{max}$ (resp.\ $d_{min}$) is the largest (resp.\ smallest) $L_\infty$ distance between any two nodes in the road network. In addition, any shortest path query can be answered in $\tilde{O}(k + \log \r)$ time, where $k$ is the number of nodes on the shortest path. On the practical side, we experimentally evaluate AH on a large set of real road networks with up to twenty million nodes, and we demonstrate that (i) AH outperforms the state of the art in terms of query time, and (ii) its space and pre-computation overheads are moderate.

cs.DS↗