The Time Has Come: Traversal and Reachability in Time-Varying Graphs

Abstract

Increasingly, enterprises require efficient graph processing capabilities to store and analyze the evolution of the graph topology over time. While a static graph captures information about the connectedness of vertices at a certain point in time, a time-varying graph keeps track of every data manipulation—insertion and removal of a vertex or an edge—performed on the graph and allows detecting topological changes, such as cluster growth and subgraph densification, and discovering behavioral patterns of the connected entities in the graph. Although temporal graph processing has been an active research area in the past decade, most well-known graph algorithms are defined on static graphs only.