Task-driven sampling of attributed networks

Suhansanu Kumar, Hari Sundaram

Abstract: This paper introduces new techniques for sampling attributed networks to support standard Data Mining tasks. The problem is important for two reasons. First, it is commonplace to perform data mining tasks such as clustering and classification of network attributes (attributes of the nodes, including social media posts). Furthermore, the extraordinarily large size of real-world networks necessitates that we work with a smaller graph sample. Second, while random sampling will provide an unbiased estimate of content, random access is often unavailable for many networks. Hence, network samplers such as Snowball sampling, Forest Fire, Random Walk, Metropolis-Hastings Random Walk are widely used; however, these attribute-agnostic samplers were designed to capture salient properties of network structure, not node content. The latter is critical for clustering and classification tasks. There are three contributions of this paper. First, we introduce several attribute-aware samplers based on Information Theoretic principles. Second, we prove that these samplers have a bias towards capturing new content, and are equivalent to uniform sampling in the limit. Finally, our experimental results over large real-world datasets and synthetic benchmarks are insightful: attribute-aware samplers outperform both random sampling and baseline attribute-agnostic samplers by a wide margin in clustering and classification tasks.