Paper detail

A Survey and Taxonomy of Graph Sampling

Graph sampling is a technique to pick a subset of vertices and/ or edges from original graph. It has a wide spectrum of applications, e.g. survey hidden population in sociology [54], visualize social graph [29], scale down Internet AS graph [27], graph sparsification [8], etc. In some scenarios, the whole graph is known and the purpose of sampling is to obtain a smaller graph. In other scenarios, the graph is unknown and sampling is regarded as a way to explore the graph. Commonly used techniques are Vertex Sampling, Edge Sampling and Traversal Based Sampling. We provide a taxonomy of different graph sampling objectives and graph sampling approaches. The relations between these approaches are formally argued and a general framework to bridge theoretical analysis and practical implementation is provided. Although being smaller in size, sampled graphs may be similar to original graphs in some way. We are particularly interested in what graph properties are preserved given a sampling procedure. If some properties are preserved, we can estimate them on the sampled graphs, which gives a way to construct efficient estimators. If one algorithm relies on the perserved properties, we can expect that it gives similar output on original and sampled graphs. This leads to a systematic way to accelerate a class of graph algorithms. In this survey, we discuss both classical text-book type properties and some advanced properties. The landscape is tabularized and we see a lot of missing works in this field. Some theoretical studies are collected in this survey and simple extensions are made. Most previous numerical evaluation works come in an ad hoc fashion, i.e. evaluate different type of graphs, different set of properties, and different sampling algorithms. A systematical and neutral evaluation is needed to shed light on further graph sampling studies.