Bridging the GAP: towards approximate graph analytics

While there has been a tremendous interest in processing data that has an underlying graph structure, existing distributed graph processing systems take several minutes or even hours to execute popular graph algorithms. However, in several cases, providing an approximate answer is good enough. Approximate analytics is seeing considerable attention in big data due to its ability to produce timely results by trading accuracy, but they do not support graph analytics. In this paper, we bridge this gap and take a first attempt at realizing approximate graph analytics. We discuss how traditional approximate analytics techniques do not carry over to the graph usecase. Leveraging the characteristics of graph properties and algorithms, we propose a graph sparsification technique, and a machine learning based approach to choose the apt amount of sparsification required to meet a given budget. Our preliminary evaluations show encouraging results.