MiDaS: Representative Sampling from Real-world Hypergraphs

Abstract

Graphs are widely used for representing pairwise interactions in complex systems. Since such real-world graphs are large and often evergrowing, sampling a small representative subgraph is indispensable for various purposes: simulation, visualization, stream processing, representation learning, crawling, to name a few. However, many complex systems consist of group interactions (e.g., collaborations of researchers and discussions on online Q&A platforms), and thus they can be represented more naturally and accurately by hypergraphs (i.e., sets of sets) than by ordinary graphs. Motivated by the prevalence of large-scale hypergraphs, we study the problem of representative sampling from real-world hypergraphs, aiming to answer (Q1) what a representative sub-hypergraph is and (Q2) how we can find a representative one rapidly without an extensive search. Regarding Q1, we propose to measure the goodness of a sub-hypergraph by comparing it with the entire hypergraph in terms of ten graph-level, hyperedge-level, and node-level statistics. Regarding Q2, we first analyze the characteristics of six intuitive approaches in 11 real-world hypergraphs. Then, based on the analysis, we propose MiDaS, which draws hyperedges with a bias towards those with high-degree nodes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MiDaS is (a) Representative: finding overall the most representative samples among 13 considered approaches, (b) Fast: several orders of magnitude faster than the strongest competitors, which performs an extensive search, and (c) Automatic: rapidly searching a proper degree of bias.