Understanding Trolls with Efficient Analytics of Large Graphs in Neo4j

Abstract

Analytics of large graph data set has become an important means of understanding and influencing the world. The use of graph database technology in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) investigation of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers or in cancer research illustrates how analysing graph-structured data helps to uncover important but hidden relationships. A very current example in that regards shows how graph analytics can help shed light on the operations of social media troll-networks, e.g. on Twitter. In similar fashion, graph analytics can help enterprises to unearth hidden patterns and structures within connected data, to make more accurate predictions and faster decisions. All this requires efficient graph analytics well-integrated with management of graph data. The Neo4j Graph Platform provides such an environment. It provides transactional processing and analytical processing of graph data including data management and analytics tooling. A central element for graph analytics in the Graph Platform are the Neo4j graph algorithms. Neo4j graph algorithms provide efficiently implemented, parallel versions of common graph algorithms, integrated and optimized for the Neo4j transactional database. In this paper, we will describe the design and integration Neo4j Graph Algorithms, demonstrate its utility of our approach with a Twitter Troll analysis, and show case its performance with a few experiments on large graphs.