Exploring and mining attributed sequences of interactions

We are faced with data comprised of entities interacting over time: this can be individuals meeting, customers buying products, machines exchanging packets on the IP network, among others. Capturing the dynamics as well as the structure of these interactions is of crucial importance for analysis. These interactions can almost always be labeled with content: group belonging, reviews of products, abstracts, etc. We model these stream of interactions as stream graphs, a recent framework to model interactions over time. Formal Concept Analysis provides a framework for analyzing concepts evolving within a context. Considering graphs as the context, it has recently been applied to perform closed pattern mining on social graphs. In this paper, we are interested in pattern mining in sequences of interactions. After recalling and extending notions from formal concept analysis on graphs to stream graphs, we introduce algorithms to enumerate closed patterns on a labeled stream graph, and introduce a way to select relevant closed patterns. We run experiments on two real-world datasets of interactions among students and citations between authors, and show both the feasibility and the relevance of our method.

Classifying Wikipedia in a fine-grained hierarchy: what graphs can contribute

Wikipedia is a huge opportunity for machine learning, being the largest semi-structured base of knowledge available. Because of this, many works examine its contents, and focus on structuring it in order to make it usable in learning tasks, for example by classifying it into an ontology. Beyond its textual contents, Wikipedia also displays a typical graph structure, where pages are linked together through citations. In this paper, we address the task of integrating graph (i.e. structure) information to classify Wikipedia into a fine-grained named entity ontology (NE), the Extended Named Entity hierarchy. To address this task, we first start by assessing the relevance of the graph structure for NE classification. We then explore two directions, one related to feature vectors using graph descriptors commonly used in large-scale network analysis, and one extending flat classification to a weighted model taking into account semantic similarity. We conduct at-scale practical experiments, on a manually labeled subset of 22,000 pages extracted from the Japanese Wikipedia. Our results show that integrating graph information succeeds at reducing sparsity of the input feature space, and yields classification results that are comparable or better than previous works.

Stream Graphs and Link Streams for the Modeling of Interactions over Time

Graph theory provides a language for studying the structure of relations, and it is often used to study interactions over time too. However, it poorly captures the both temporal and structural nature of interactions, that calls for a dedicated formalism. In this paper, we generalize graph concepts in order to cope with both aspects in a consistent way. We start with elementary concepts like density, clusters, or paths, and derive from them more advanced concepts like cliques, degrees, clustering coefficients, or connected components. We obtain a language to directly deal with interactions over time, similar to the language provided by graphs to deal with relations. This formalism is self-consistent: usual relations between different concepts are preserved. It is also consistent with graph theory: graph concepts are special cases of the ones we introduce. This makes it easy to generalize higher-level objects such as quotient graphs, line graphs, k-cores, and centralities. This paper also considers discrete versus continuous time assumptions, instantaneous links, and extensions to more complex cases.