PERSEUS-HUB: Interactive and Collective Exploration of Large-Scale Graphs

Graphs emerge naturally in many domains, such as social science, neuroscience, transportation engineering, and more. In many cases, such graphs have millions or billions of nodes and edges, and their sizes increase daily at a fast pace. How can researchers from various domains explore large graphs interactively and efficiently to find out what is ‘important’? How can multiple researchers explore a new graph dataset collectively and “help” each other with their findings? In this article, we present PERSEUS-HUB, a large-scale graph mining tool that computes a set of graph properties in a distributed manner, performs ensemble, multi-view anomaly detection to highlight regions that are worth investigating, and provides users with uncluttered visualization and easy interaction with complex graph statistics. PERSEUS-HUB uses a Spark cluster to calculate various statistics of large-scale graphs efficiently, and aggregates the results in a summary on the master node to support interactive user exploration. In PERSEUS-HUB, the visualized distributions of graph statistics provide preliminary analysis to understand a graph. To perform a deeper analysis, users with little prior knowledge can leverage patterns (e.g., spikes in the power-law degree distribution) marked by other users or experts. Moreover, PERSEUS-HUB guides users to regions of interest by highlighting anomalous nodes and helps users establish a more comprehensive understanding about the graph at hand. We demonstrate our system through the case study on real, large-scale networks.