Effective and Efficient Community Search Over Large Directed Graphs

Communities are prevalent in social networks, knowledge graphs, and biological networks. Recently, the topic of community search (CS), extracting a dense subgraph containing a query vertex q from a graph, has received great attention. However, existing CS solutions are designed for undirected graphs, and overlook directions of edges which potentially lose useful information carried on directions. In many applications (e.g., Twitter), users' relationships are often modeled as directed graphs (e.g., if a user a follows another user b, then there is an edge from a to b). In this paper, we study the problem of CS on directed graph. Given a vertex q of a graph G, we aim to find a densely connected subgraph containing q from G, in which vertices have strong interactions and high similarities, by using the minimum in/out-degrees metric. We first develop a baseline algorithm based on the concept of D-core. We further propose three index structures and corresponding query algorithms. Our experimental results on seven real graphs show that our solutions are very effective and efficient. For example, on a graph with over 1 billion of edges, we only need around 40mins to index it and 1~2sec to answer a query.