Indexing Public-Private Graphs

Aaron Archer, Silvio Lattanzi, Peter Likarish, Sergei Vassilvitskii

Abstract: We consider the reachability indexing problem for private-public directed graphs. In these graphs nodes come in three flavors: public--nodes visible to all users, private--nodes visible to a specific set of users, and protected--nodes visible to any user who can see at least one of the node's parents. We are interested in computing the set of nodes visible to a specific user online. There are two obvious algorithms: precompute the result for every user, or run a reachability algorithm at query time. This paper explores the trade-off between these two strategies. Our approach is to identify a set of additional visible seed nodes for each user. The online reachability algorithm explores the graph starting at these nodes. We first formulate the problem as asymmetric k-center with outliers, and then give an efficient and practical algorithm. We prove new theoretical guarantees for this problem and show empirically that it performs very well in practice.