ABSTRACT This paper addresses the novel and challenging domain of graph entity dependencies (GEDs) discovery, which aims to identify dependencies in large graphs that are nearly satisfied despite the presence of errors, exceptions and ambiguities in real‐world data. We propose a unique error measure specifically designed for GED semantics and innovatively adapts concepts of disagreement and necessary sets to the realm of graph dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce the FastAGEDs+ algorithm, which significantly enhances efficiency in discovering approximate GEDs, employing a depth‐first search strategy for optimal candidate space traversal. Incorporating an innovative pruning strategy, F ast AGEDs+ efficiently narrows down the search space, significantly reducing computational overhead while maintaining accuracy. Through extensive experimentation on real‐world graphs, we demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of our approach, offering substantial improvements in data quality and management practices.

This paper studies the entity resolution (ER) problem in property graphs. ER is the task of identifying and linking different records that refer to the same real-world entity. It is commonly used in data integration, data cleansing, and other applications where it is important to have accurate and consistent data. In general, two predominant approaches exist in the literature: rule-based and learning-based methods. On the one hand, rule-based techniques are often desired due to their explainability and ability to encode domain knowledge. Learning-based methods, on the other hand, are preferred due to their effectiveness in spite of their black-box nature. In this work, we devise a hybrid ER solution, GraphER , that leverages the strengths of both systems for property graphs. In particular, we adopt graph differential dependency (GDD) for encoding the so-called record-matching rules , and employ them to guide a graph neural network (GNN) based representation learning for the task. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation of our proposal on benchmark ER datasets including 17 graph datasets and 7 relational datasets in comparison with 10 state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques. The results show that our approach provides a significantly better solution to addressing ER in graph data, both quantitatively and qualitatively, while attaining highly competitive results on the benchmark relational datasets w.r.t. the SOTA solutions.

Abstract Over the last few decades, machine learning (ML) applications have grown exponentially, yielding several benefits to society. However, these benefits are tempered with concerns of discriminatory behaviours exhibited by ML models. In this regard, fairness in machine learning has emerged as a priority research area. Consequently, several fairness metrics and algorithms have been developed to mitigate against discriminatory behaviours that ML models may possess. Yet still, very little attention has been paid to the problem of naturally occurring changes in data patterns (aka data distributional drift), and its impact on fairness algorithms and metrics. In this work, we study this problem comprehensively by analyzing 4 fairness-unaware baseline algorithms and 7 fairness-aware algorithms, carefully curated to cover the breadth of its typology, across 5 datasets including public and proprietary data, and evaluated them using 3 predictive performance and 10 fairness metrics. In doing so, we show that (1) data distributional drift is not a trivial occurrence, and in several cases can lead to serious deterioration of fairness in so-called fair models; (2) contrary to some existing literature, the size and direction of data distributional drift is not correlated to the resulting size and direction of unfairness; and (3) choice of, and training of fairness algorithms is impacted by the effect of data distributional drift which is largely ignored in the literature. Emanating from our findings, we synthesize several policy implications of data distributional drift on fairness algorithms that can be very relevant to stakeholders and practitioners.

Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction is crucial for drug development and repositioning. Methods using heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) for DTI prediction have become a promising approach, with attention-based models often achieving excellent performance. However, these methods typically overlook edge features when dealing with heterogeneous biomedical networks. We propose a heterogeneous network-based contrastive learning method called HNCL-DTI, which designs a heterogeneous graph attention network to predict potential/novel DTIs. Specifically, our HNCL-DTI utilizes contrastive learning to collaboratively learn node representations from the perspective of both node-based and edge-based attention within the heterogeneous structure of biomedical networks. Experimental results show that HNCL-DTI outperforms existing advanced baseline methods on benchmark datasets, demonstrating strong predictive ability and practical effectiveness. The data and source code are available at https://github.com/Zaiwen/HNCL-DTI.

Graph entity dependencies (GEDs) are novel graph constraints, unifying keys and functional dependencies, for property graphs. They have been found useful in many real-world data quality and data management tasks, including fact checking on social media networks and entity resolution. In this paper, we study the discovery problem of GEDs—finding a minimal cover of valid GEDs in a given graph data. We formalise the problem, and propose an effective and efficient approach to overcome major bottlenecks in GED discovery. In particular, we leverage existing graph partitioning algorithms to enable fast GED-scope discovery, and employ effective pruning strategies over the prohibitively large space of candidate dependencies. Furthermore, we define an interestingness measure for GEDs based on the minimum description length principle, to score and rank the mined cover set of GEDs. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our GED discovery approach through extensive experiments on real-world benchmark graph data sets; and present the usefulness of the discovered rules in different downstream data quality management applications.

Traditionally the integration of data from multiple sources is done on an ad-hoc basis for each analysis scenario and application. This is an approach that is inflexible, incurs high costs, and leads to “silos” that prevent sharing data across different agencies or tasks. A standard approach to tackling this problem is to design a common ontology and to construct source descriptions which specify mappings between the sources and the ontology. Modeling the semantics of data manually requires huge human cost and expertise, making an automatic method of semantic modeling desired. Automatic semantic model has been gaining attention in data integration [5], federated data query [14] and knowledge graph construction [6]. This paper proposes an service-oriented architecture to create a correct semantic model, including annotating training data, training the machine learning model, and predict an accurate semantic model for new data source. Moreover, a holistic process for automatic semantic modeling is presented. By the usage of ASMaaS, historical semantic annotations for training machine learning model used in automatic semantic modeling can be shared, reducing costs of human resources from users. By specifying a well defined interface, users are able to have access to automatic semantic modeling process at any time, from anywhere. In addition, users must not be concerned with machine learning technologies and pipeline used in automatic semantic modeling, focusing mainly on the business itself.

Story timeline summarization is widely used by analysts, law enforcement agencies, and policymakers for content presentation, story-telling, and other data-driven decision-making applications. Recent advancements in web technologies have rendered social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook as a viable platform for discovering evolving stories and trending events for story timeline summarization. However, a timeline summarization structure that models complex evolving stories by tracking event evolution to identify different themes of a story and generate a coherent structure that is easy for users to understand is yet to be explored. In this paper, we propose StoryGraph, a novel graph timeline summarization structure that is capable of identifying the different themes of a story. By using high penalty metrics that leverage user network communities, temporal proximity, and the semantic context of the events, we construct coherent paths and generate structural timeline summaries to tell the story of how events evolve over time. We performed experiments on real-world datasets to show the prowess of StoryGraph. StoryGraph outperforms existing models and produces accurate timeline summarizations. As a key finding, we discover that user network communities increase coherence leading to the generation of consistent summary structures.

Entity resolution (ER) is the problem of accurately identifying multiple, differing, and possibly contradicting representations of unique real-world entities in data. It is a challenging and fundamental task in data cleansing and data integration. In this work, we propose graph differential dependencies (GDDs) as an extension of the recently developed graph entity dependencies (which are formal constraints for graph data) to enable approximate matching of values. Furthermore, we investigate a special discovery of GDDs for ER by designing an algorithm for generating a non-redundant set of GDDs in labelled data. Then, we develop an effective ER technique, Certus, that employs the learned GDDs for improving the accuracy of ER results. We perform extensive empirical evaluation of our proposals on five real-world ER benchmark datasets and a proprietary database to test their effectiveness and efficiency. The results from the experiments show the discovery algorithm and Certus are efficient; and more importantly, GDDs significantly improve the precision of ER without considerable trade-off of recall.