Discovering how graphs function and their relevance in different fields requires an examination of graph analytics. Graphs are essential tools with countless practical applications such as social network analysis, cybersecurity concerns, and predictive analytics. This piece aims to reveal the intricacies behind this dynamic tool while highlighting its importance amid latest technological advancements.
What is a Graph?
A Graph is a mathematical structure that is used to model various types of relationships in different systems. In simple terms, it is a collection of nodes or vertices connected by edges.
The nodes or vertices (representing the entities) are connected by edges (representing relationships between those entities). Nodes can be people, groups, places, organisations, products, bank accounts, or devices. While examples of edges between nodes, include friendships, network connections, hyperlinks, roads, routes, wires, phone calls, emails, tweets, “likes,” or payments.
Edges can have a one-way direction arrow to represent a relationship from one node to another, for example, if David “purchased” an item from Teke and Amos "reacted" to Lucky's Instagram post.
However, edges can also be non-directional, like Marcos and Tito being connections on LinkedIn and Janet Jackson being a sibling to Michael Jackson.
Why Graphs?
Graph analytics can be used to determine the strength and direction of relationships between objects in a graph, such as analyzing relationships in social networks, cyber threat detection, and identifying the people most likely to buy a product based on shared preferences.
Graph analytics has been very effective in achieving the following:
- Detect financial crimes such as money laundering
- Identify fraudulent transactions and activities
- Perform influencer analysis in social network communities
- Do recommendation analysis from customers ratings or purchases
- Identify weaknesses in power grids, water grids, and transportation networks
- Optimize routes in the airlines, retail, and manufacturing industries
- Understanding how influence works so marketers can target the people who are most likely to create word-of-mouth awareness for their products
- Helping political campaigns and political scientists better understand the factors that contribute to information virality and the dissemination of fake news.
Conclusion
The application of graph analytics is ever-present and has proved powerful in a variety of fields, including cyber threat detection and social networks. Graph analysis enables us to represent multi-dimensional structures with ease while also simplifying the interpretation process thereof. This provides an array of insights that can be applied using Apache AGE by data scientists or business analysts among others, given their potential to inform better decision-making processes.
For more information on Apache AGE, visit:
AGE website
AGE GitHub
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