Working with Graphs

Graphs allow us to understand complex networks by focusing on relationships between pairs of items. Each item is represented by a vertex in the graph, and relationships between items are represented by edges.

To facilitate graph-oriented data analysis, Turi Create offers a SGraph object, a scalable graph data structure backed by SFrames. In this chapter, we show that SGraphs allow arbitrary dictionary attributes on vertices and edges, flexible vertex and edge query functions, and seamless transformation to and from SFrames.

Creating an SGraph

There are several ways to create an SGraph. The simplest is to start with an empty graph, then add vertices and edges in the form of lists of turicreate.Vertex and turicreate.Edge objects. SGraphs are structurally immutable; in the following snippet, add_vertices and add_edges both return a new graph.

from turicreate import SGraph, Vertex, Edge
g = SGraph()
verts = [Vertex(0, attr={'breed': 'labrador'}),
         Vertex(1, attr={'breed': 'labrador'}),
         Vertex(2, attr={'breed': 'vizsla'})]
g = g.add_vertices(verts)
g = g.add_edges(Edge(1, 2))
print(g)
SGraph({'num_edges': 1, 'num_vertices': 3})
Vertex Fields:['__id', 'breed']
Edge Fields:['__src_id', '__dst_id']

We can chain these steps together to make a new graph in a single line.

g = SGraph().add_vertices([Vertex(i) for i in range(10)]).add_edges(
    [Edge(i, i+1) for i in range(9)])

SGraphs can also be created from an edge list stored in an SFrame. Vertices are added to the graph automatically based on the edge list, and columns of the SFrame not used as source or destination vertex IDs are assumed to be edge attributes. Suppose we import a dataset of James Bond characters to an SFrame, then build the graph.

from turicreate import SFrame
edge_data = SFrame.read_csv('bond_edges.csv')

g = SGraph()
g = g.add_edges(edge_data, src_field='src', dst_field='dst')
print(g)
SGraph({'num_edges': 20, 'num_vertices': 10})

The SGraph constructor also accepts vertex and edge SFrames directly. We can construct the same James Bond graph with the following two lines:

vertex_data = SFrame.read_csv('bond_vertices.csv')

g = SGraph(vertices=vertex_data, edges=edge_data, vid_field='name',
           src_field='src', dst_field='dst')

Finally, an SGraph can be created directly from a file, either local or remote, using the turicreate.load_sgraph() method. Loading a graph with this method works with both the native binary save format and a variety of text formats. In the following example we save the SGraph in binary format to a new folder called "james_bond", then re-load it under a different name.

g.save('james_bond.sgraph')
new_graph = turicreate.load_sgraph('james_bond.sgraph')

Inspecting SGraphs

Graphs can be explored with SGraph.summary---which prints the number of vertices and edges---or by retrieving and plotting subsets of edges and vertices.

print(g.summary())
{'num_edges': 20, 'num_vertices': 10}

To retrieve the contents of an SGraph, the get_vertices and get_edges methods return SFrames. These functions can filter edges and vertices based on vertex IDs or attributes. Omitting IDs and attributes returns all vertices or edges.

sub_verts = g.get_vertices(ids=['James Bond'])
print(sub_verts)
+------------+--------+-----------------+---------+
|    __id    | gender | license_to_kill | villain |
+------------+--------+-----------------+---------+
| James Bond |   M    |        1        |    0    |
+------------+--------+-----------------+---------+
[1 rows x 4 columns]
sub_edges = g.get_edges(fields={'relation': 'worksfor'})
print(sub_edges)
+---------------+-------------+----------+
|    __src_id   |   __dst_id  | relation |
+---------------+-------------+----------+
|       M       |  Moneypenny | worksfor |
|       M       |  James Bond | worksfor |
|       M       |      Q      | worksfor |
| Elliot Carver | Henry Gupta | worksfor |
| Elliot Carver |  Gotz Otto  | worksfor |
+---------------+-------------+----------+
[5 rows x 3 columns]

The get_neighborhood method provides a convenient way to retrieve the subset of a graph near a set of target vertices, also known as the egocentric neighborhood of the target vertices. The radius of the neighborhood is the maximum length of a path between any of the targets and a neighborhood vertex. If full_subgraph is true, then edges between neighborhood vertices are included even if the edges are not on direct paths between a target and a neighbor.

targets = ['James Bond', 'Moneypenny']
subgraph = g.get_neighborhood(ids=targets, radius=1, full_subgraph=True)
print(subgraph)
SGraph({'num_edges': 15, 'num_vertices': 8})

Modifying SGraphs

SGraphs are structurally immutable, but the data stored on vertices and edges can be mutated using two special SGraph properties. SGraph.vertices and SGraph.edges are SFrames containing the vertex and edge data, respectively. The following examples show the difference between the special graph-related SFrames and normal SFrames. First, note that the following lines both produce the same effect.

g.edges.print_rows(5)
g.get_edges().print_rows(5)
+----------------+----------------+------------+
|    __src_id    |    __dst_id    |  relation  |
+----------------+----------------+------------+
|   Moneypenny   |       M        | managed_by |
| Inga Bergstorm |   James Bond   |   friend   |
|   Moneypenny   |       Q        | colleague  |
|  Henry Gupta   | Elliot Carver  | killed_by  |
|   James Bond   | Inga Bergstorm |   friend   |
+----------------+----------------+------------+
[5 rows x 3 columns]

The difference is that the return value of g.get_edges() is a normal SFrame independent from g, whereas g.edges is bound to g. We can modify the edge data using this special edge SFrame. The next snippet mutates the relation attribute on the edges of g. In particular, it extracts the first letter and converts it to upper case.

g.edges['relation'] = g.edges['relation'].apply(lambda x: x[0].upper())
g.get_edges().print_rows(5)
+----------------+----------------+----------+
|    __src_id    |    __dst_id    | relation |
+----------------+----------------+----------+
|   Moneypenny   |       M        |    M     |
| Inga Bergstorm |   James Bond   |    F     |
|   Moneypenny   |       Q        |    C     |
|  Henry Gupta   | Elliot Carver  |    K     |
|   James Bond   | Inga Bergstorm |    F     |
|      ...       |      ...       |   ...    |
+----------------+----------------+----------+
[20 rows x 3 columns]

On the other hand, the following code does not mutate the relation attribute on the edges of g. If it had a permanent effect, the relation field would be converted a lower case letter, but in the result it clearly remains upper case.

e = g.get_edges()  # e is a normal SFrame independent of g.
e['relation'] = e['relation'].apply(lambda x: x[0].lower())
g.get_edges().print_rows(5)
+----------------+----------------+----------+
|    __src_id    |    __dst_id    | relation |
+----------------+----------------+----------+
|   Moneypenny   |       M        |    M     |
| Inga Bergstorm |   James Bond   |    F     |
|   Moneypenny   |       Q        |    C     |
|  Henry Gupta   | Elliot Carver  |    K     |
|   James Bond   | Inga Bergstorm |    F     |
|      ...       |      ...       |   ...    |
+----------------+----------------+----------+
[20 rows x 3 columns]

Calling a method like head(), tail(), or append() on a special graph-related SFrame also results in a new instance of a regular SFrame. For example, the following code does not mutate g.

e = g.edges.head(5)
e['is_friend'] = e['relation'].apply(lambda x: x[0] == 'F')

Another important difference of these two special SFrames is that the __id, __src_id, and __dst_id fields are not mutable because changing them would change the structure of the graph and SGraph is structurally immutable.

Otherwise, g.vertices and g.edges act like normal SFrames, which makes modifying graph data very easy. For example, adding (removing) an edge field is the same as adding (removing) a column to (from) an SFrame:

g.edges['weight'] = 1.0
del g.edges['weight']

The triple_apply method provides a particularly powerful way to modify SGraph vertex and edge attributes. triple_apply applies a user-defined function to all edges asynchronously, allowing you to do a computation that modifies edge data based on vertex data, or vice versa. A wide range of methods---single-source shortest path and weighted PageRank, for example---can be expressed very simply with this primitive.

The first step is to define a function that takes as input an edge in the graph, together with the incident source and destination vertices. This triple apply function modifies vertex and edge fields in some way, then returns the modified (source vertex, edge, destination vertex) triple. In this example, we compute the degree of each vertex in the James Bond graph, which is the number of edges that touch each vertex.

def increment_degree(src, edge, dst):
    src['degree'] += 1
    dst['degree'] += 1
    return (src, edge, dst)

The next step is to create a new field in our SGraph's vertex data to hold the answer.

g.vertices['degree'] = 0

Finally, we use the triple_apply method to apply the function to all of the edges (together with their incident source and destination vertices). This method requires specification of which fields are allowed to be changed by the our function.

g = g.triple_apply(increment_degree, mutated_fields=['degree'])
print g.vertices.sort('degree', ascending=False)
+----------------+--------+--------+-----------------+---------+
|      __id      | degree | gender | license_to_kill | villain |
+----------------+--------+--------+-----------------+---------+
|   James Bond   |   8    |   M    |        1        |    0    |
| Elliot Carver  |   7    |   M    |        0        |    1    |
|       M        |   6    |   M    |        1        |    0    |
|   Moneypenny   |   4    |   F    |        1        |    0    |
|       Q        |   4    |   M    |        1        |    0    |
|  Paris Carver  |   3    |   F    |        0        |    1    |
| Inga Bergstorm |   2    |   F    |        0        |    0    |
|  Henry Gupta   |   2    |   M    |        0        |    1    |
|    Wai Lin     |   2    |   F    |        1        |    0    |
|   Gotz Otto    |   2    |   M    |        0        |    1    |
+----------------+--------+--------+-----------------+---------+
[10 rows x 5 columns]

James Bond is quite the popular guy!

To learn more, check out the graph analytics toolkits, the API Reference for SGraphs.

results matching ""

    No results matching ""