A survey of continuous subgraph matching for dynamic graphs

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technologies, multi-source heterogeneous data has become an open problem, and the data is usually modeled as graphs since the graph structure is able to encode complex relationships among entities. However, in practical applications, such as network security analysis and public opinion analysis over social networks, the structure and the content of graph data are constantly evolving. Therefore, the ability to continuously monitor and detect interesting patterns on massive and dynamic graphs in real-time is crucial for many applications. Recently, a large group of excellent research works has also emerged. Nevertheless, these studies focus on different updates of graphs and apply different subgraph matching algorithms; thus, it is desirable to review these works comprehensively and give a thorough overview. In this paper, we systematically investigate the existing continuous subgraph matching techniques from the aspects of key techniques, representative algorithms, and performance evaluation. Furthermore, the typical applications and challenges of continuous subgraph matching over dynamic graphs, as well as the future development trends, are summarized and prospected.