We revisit column-oriented storage and query processing techniques in the context of contemporary graph database management systems (GDBMSs). Similar to column-oriented RDBMSs, GDBMSs support read-heavy analytical workloads that however have fundamentally different data access patterns than traditional analytical workloads. We first derive a set of desiderata for optimizing storage and query processors of GDBMS based on their access patterns. We then present the design of columnar storage, compression, and query processing techniques based on these desiderata. In addition to showing direct integration of existing techniques from columnar RDBMSs, we also propose novel ones that are optimized for GDBMSs. These include a novel list-based query processor, which avoids expensive data copies of traditional block-based processors under many-to-many joins, a new data structure we call single-indexed edge property pages and an accompanying edge ID scheme, and a new application of Jacobson's bit vector index for compressing NULL values and empty lists. We integrated our techniques into the GraphflowDB in-memory GDBMS. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the scalability and query performance benefits of our techniques.
In order to be able to apply graph isomorphism checking within interactive theorem provers, either graph isomorphism checking algorithms must be mechanically verified, or their results must be verifiable by independent checkers. We analyze a state-of-the-art graph isomorphism checking algorithm (described by McKay and Piperno) and formulate it in a form of a formal proof system. We provide an implementation that can export a proof that an obtained graph is the canonical form of a given graph. Such proofs are then verified by our independent checker, and are used to certify that two given graphs are non-isomorphic.
Digital and physical footprints are a trail of user activities collected over the use of software applications and systems. As software becomes ubiquitous, protecting user privacy has become challenging. With the increasing of user privacy awareness and advent of privacy regulations and policies, there is an emerging need to implement software systems that enhance the protection of personal data processing. However, existing privacy regulations and policies only provide high-level principles which are difficult for software engineers to design and implement privacy-aware systems. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy that provides a comprehensive set of privacy requirements based on four well-established personal data protection regulations and privacy frameworks, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ISO/IEC 29100, Thailand Personal Data Protection (PDPA) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) privacy framework. These requirements are extracted, classified and refined into a level that can be used to map with issue reports. We have also performed a study on how two large open-source software projects (Google Chrome and Moodle) address the privacy requirements in our taxonomy through mining their issue reports. The paper discusses how the collected issues were classified, and presents the findings and insights generated from our study.
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today's Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach of recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories, spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data, and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions of this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their codes repositories in //github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.
Nowadays, recommender systems are present in many daily activities such as online shopping, browsing social networks, etc. Given the rising demand for reinvigoration of the tourist industry through information technology, recommenders have been included into tourism websites such as Expedia, Booking or Tripadvisor, among others. Furthermore, the amount of scientific papers related to recommender systems for tourism is on solid and continuous growth since 2004. Much of this growth is due to social networks that, besides to offer researchers the possibility of using a great mass of available and constantly updated data, they also enable the recommendation systems to become more personalised, effective and natural. This paper reviews and analyses many research publications focusing on tourism recommender systems that use social networks in their projects. We detail their main characteristics, like which social networks are exploited, which data is extracted, the applied recommendation techniques, the methods of evaluation, etc. Through a comprehensive literature review, we aim to collaborate with the future recommender systems, by giving some clear classifications and descriptions of the current tourism recommender systems.
The era of big data provides researchers with convenient access to copious data. However, people often have little knowledge about it. The increasing prevalence of big data is challenging the traditional methods of learning causality because they are developed for the cases with limited amount of data and solid prior causal knowledge. This survey aims to close the gap between big data and learning causality with a comprehensive and structured review of traditional and frontier methods and a discussion about some open problems of learning causality. We begin with preliminaries of learning causality. Then we categorize and revisit methods of learning causality for the typical problems and data types. After that, we discuss the connections between learning causality and machine learning. At the end, some open problems are presented to show the great potential of learning causality with data.
Querying graph structured data is a fundamental operation that enables important applications including knowledge graph search, social network analysis, and cyber-network security. However, the growing size of real-world data graphs poses severe challenges for graph databases to meet the response-time requirements of the applications. Planning the computational steps of query processing - Query Planning - is central to address these challenges. In this paper, we study the problem of learning to speedup query planning in graph databases towards the goal of improving the computational-efficiency of query processing via training queries.We present a Learning to Plan (L2P) framework that is applicable to a large class of query reasoners that follow the Threshold Algorithm (TA) approach. First, we define a generic search space over candidate query plans, and identify target search trajectories (query plans) corresponding to the training queries by performing an expensive search. Subsequently, we learn greedy search control knowledge to imitate the search behavior of the target query plans. We provide a concrete instantiation of our L2P framework for STAR, a state-of-the-art graph query reasoner. Our experiments on benchmark knowledge graphs including DBpedia, YAGO, and Freebase show that using the query plans generated by the learned search control knowledge, we can significantly improve the speed of STAR with negligible loss in accuracy.
We propose a novel recommendation method based on tree. With user behavior data, the tree based model can capture user interests from coarse to fine, by traversing nodes top down and make decisions whether to pick up each node to user. Compared to traditional model-based methods like matrix factorization (MF), our tree based model does not have to fetch and estimate each item in the entire set. Instead, candidates are drawn from subsets corresponding to user's high-level interests, which is defined by the tree structure. Meanwhile, finding candidates from the entire corpus brings more novelty than content-based approaches like item-based collaborative filtering.Moreover, in this paper, we show that the tree structure can also act to refine user interests distribution, to benefit both training and prediction. The experimental results in both open dataset and Taobao display advertising dataset indicate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods.
With the ever-growing volume, complexity and dynamicity of online information, recommender system has been an effective key solution to overcome such information overload. In recent years, deep learning's revolutionary advances in speech recognition, image analysis and natural language processing have gained significant attention. Meanwhile, recent studies also demonstrate its effectiveness in coping with information retrieval and recommendation tasks. Applying deep learning techniques into recommender system has been gaining momentum due to its state-of-the-art performances and high-quality recommendations. In contrast to traditional recommendation models, deep learning provides a better understanding of user's demands, item's characteristics and historical interactions between them. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems towards fostering innovations of recommender system research. A taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models is presented and used to categorize the surveyed articles. Open problems are identified based on the analytics of the reviewed works and potential solutions discussed.