English

Graph Summarization Methods and Applications: A Survey

Information Retrieval 2020-04-03 v3 Artificial Intelligence Databases Social and Information Networks

Abstract

While advances in computing resources have made processing enormous amounts of data possible, human ability to identify patterns in such data has not scaled accordingly. Efficient computational methods for condensing and simplifying data are thus becoming vital for extracting actionable insights. In particular, while data summarization techniques have been studied extensively, only recently has summarizing interconnected data, or graphs, become popular. This survey is a structured, comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art methods for summarizing graph data. We first broach the motivation behind, and the challenges of, graph summarization. We then categorize summarization approaches by the type of graphs taken as input and further organize each category by core methodology. Finally, we discuss applications of summarization on real-world graphs and conclude by describing some open problems in the field.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.04883,
  title  = {Graph Summarization Methods and Applications: A Survey},
  author = {Yike Liu and Tara Safavi and Abhilash Dighe and Danai Koutra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.04883},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:24:14.302Z