Approximating 4-cliques in streaming graphs: the power of dual sampling

Abstract

Clique counting is considered to be a challenging problem in graph mining. The reason is combinatorial explosion; even moderate graphs with a few million edges could have clique counts in the order of many billions. In this paper, we propose a fast and scalable algorithm for approximating 4-clique counts in a single-pass streaming model. By leveraging a combination of sampling approaches, we estimate the 4-clique count with high accuracy. Our algorithm performs well on massive graphs containing several billions of 4-cliques, and terminates within a reasonable amount of time.