On Dense Pattern Mining in Graph Streams

Many massive web and communication network applications create data which can be represented as a massive sequential stream of edges. For example, conversations in a telecommunication network or messages in a social network can be represented as a massive stream of edges. Such streams are typically very large, because of the large amount of underlying activity in such networks. An important application in these domains is to determine frequently occurring dense structures in the underlying graph stream. In general, we would like to determine frequent and dense patterns in the underlying interactions. We introduce a model for dense pattern mining and propose probabilistic algorithms for determining such structural patterns effectively and efficiently. The purpose of the probabilistic approach is to create a summarization of the graph stream, which can be used for further pattern mining. We show that this summarization approach leads to effective and efficient results for stream pattern mining over a number of real and synthetic data sets.