Analyzing complex data in motion at scale with temporal graphs

Abstract

Modern analytics solutions succeed to understand and predict phenomenons in a large diversity of software systems, from social networks to Internet-of-Things platforms. This success challenges analytics algorithms to deal with more and more complex data, which can be structured as graphs and evolve over time. However, the underlying data storage systems that support large-scale data analytics, such as time-series or graph databases, fail to accommodate both dimensions, which limits the integration of more advanced analysis taking into account the history of complex graphs, for example. This paper therefore introduces a formal and practical definition of temporal graphs. Temporal graphs provide a compact representation of time-evolving graphs that can be used to analyze complex data in motion. In particular, we demonstrate with our open-source implementation, named GREYCAT, that the performance of temporal graphs allows analytics solutions to deal with rapidly evolving large-scale graphs.