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Aggregate Queries on Knowledge Graphs: Fast Approximation with Semantic-aware Sampling

A knowledge graph (KG) manages large-scale and real-world facts as a big graph in a schema-flexible manner. Aggregate query is a fundamental query over KGs, e.g., "what is the average price of cars produced in Germany?". Despite its importance, answering aggregate queries on KGs has received little attention in the literature. Aggregate queries can be supported based on factoid queries, e.g., "find all cars produced in Germany", by applying an additional aggregate operation on factoid queries' answers. However, this straightforward method is challenging because both the accuracy and efficiency of factoid query processing will seriously impact the performance of aggregate queries. In this paper, we propose a "sampling-estimation" model to answer aggregate queries over KGs, which is the first work to provide an approximate aggregate result with an effective accuracy guarantee, and without relying on factoid queries. Specifically, we first present a semantic-aware sampling to collect a high-quality random sample through a random walk based on knowledge graph embedding. Then, we propose unbiased estimators for COUNT, SUM, and a consistent estimator for AVG to compute the approximate aggregate results based on the random sample, with an accuracy guarantee in the form of confidence interval. We extend our approach to support iterative improvement of accuracy, and more complex queries with filter, GROUP-BY, and different graph shapes, e.g., chain, cycle, star, flower. Extensive experiments over real-world KGs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.