Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 3 - This Month in Neo4j

Happy new year everyone - although it actually seem like the holidays are already very far behind us! But great times were had, at least in my family, and so I feel super energised to make 2020 another great start to a decade of graphs :) ... Here's to that!

It also means that we are continuing to see all these awesome community stories pop up left right and center in the Neo4j "This week in Neo4j" developer newsletter. And so on our Graphistania podcast, we are going to continue talking about these on a monthly basis. So that's what we're doing - and I have again invited my friend and colleague Stefan Wendin to join me.

From the newsletter, we always select a few stories that we think will be more interesting and/or meaningful to discuss. This month, we found a number of them, and the interesting thing was that the graph-stories seemed to play at very different scales... The Personal, Corporate, and Society levels. Here are some of the ones we liked:

At the Personal scale

• Alex Woolford - Network analysis with Neo4j / Kafka / Zeek. Alex also has this really cool video on "Event driven parenting": if your kid is getting bad grades, that event will lead to no more PS4 network access :) ... Bit harsh - but still!

At the Corporate scale

• IT centric example: Managing VMware infrastructure with Neo4j - great example of how to understand infrastructure dependencies in an IT environment with graphs.
• Business centric examples: Analysing online customer journeys in 3D and Using Augmented Reality to create an indoor navigation system with VIROREACT. This also reminded me of these examples of using Neo4j to build digital twins for wind farms and digital twins for subsea gas. 
• Maybe one more - very specific to the graph world and totally optional: Keeping track of graph changes using temporal versioning. This references: Neo4j Versioner - they recently released version 2. I really like that. 

At the Society scale, we saw some amazing posts:

• State-Sponsored Twitter Accounts Pushing For War With Iran
• Visualizing Breast Cancer Data with Neo4j and GraphXR 

So I think you agree that we had plenty of stuff to talk about. Let's get into that!

Part 3/3: Revisiting Hillary Clinton's email corpus with graph algos and NLP

(Note: this is Part 3 of this blogpost.  Part 1 and Part 2 are also published.)

Alright this is going to be the third and final part of my work on the Hillary Clinton Email Corpus. There's two posts that came before this article:

• in the first post we focused on importing and refactoring the data in Neo4j
• in the second post we spent some time analysing the dataset with some algorithms and some specific pattern matching queries

Now we are going to spent some time with the "heart of the matter", the actual content of the emails. We are going to do that in two steps: first we will do some "full text" querying of some data, using Neo4j's specific full text indexing capabilities. Then we are going to go a step further and try to extract more knowledge from this dataset in an automated way, by running some Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms and processes on it.

Let's get right to it.

Fulltext querying of Emails

Those of you that have been following Neo4j for some time, may remember that we have always bundled Apache Lucene with Neo4j. For the longest time, Neo4j used Lucene for it's indexing capabilities. This turned out to be a great choice for many things, but also one that had its limitations and trade-offs. This is why Neo4j has gradually been switching away from Lucene for its core schema indexing capability, and has adopted a modular, pluggable indexing architecture that allows for different indexing techniques to be used for different data types. This is great news for many reasons, but one of the most important benefits has been a dramatic increase in write performance - as the newer indexes are much more optimized and leaner than the older Lucene based structures. Read more about indexing in the Neo4j manual.

So as I started to think about some text-oriented queries, I quickly realised that I would need an index on Email text. So I wanted to do

create index on :Email(text)

and query that index afterwards. But the result was pretty obvious:

Part 2/3: Revisiting Hillary Clinton's email corpus with graph algos and NLP

(Note: this is Part 2 of this blogpost.  Part 1 and Part 3 are also published.)

In the previous post around the emails of Hillary Clinton, we were able to import the data from a CSV file, and use some really cool graph refactoring tools to make the database a little more easy to work with - bad data is bad data, and the less we have of that the better.

So we ended up in a reasonably stable state, where we could do some querying. In this post, we will do exactly that.

Exploring the graph with graph algos

It's fairly easy to get a good initial view of the structure and size of the graph. I just run a few queries like this:

//what nodes are in the db

match (n) return labels(n), count(n)

and: 

//what rels are in the db

MATCH p=()-[r]->() RETURN type(r), count(r)

and we very quickly see that, while this is clearly not a "big" dataset, it's still big enough to start loosing some significant time sifting through data if you want to make some sense of it. This is where our fantastic graph algorithms come in. I installed the plugin into my database, restarted it, and then I also played around a bit with Neuler, a graph algo playground that basically allows you to quickly experiment with different algorithms. You can download Neuler from https://install.graphapp.io/ and install it into your Neo4j Desktop really quickly.

Part 1/3: Revisiting Hillary Clinton's email corpus with graph algos and NLP

(Note: this is Part 1 of this blogpost. Part 2 and Part 3 are also published.)

With lots of interesting political manoeuvring going on in the USA and in Europe, I somehow got into a rabbit hole where I came across the corpus of emails that were published in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elections. They have been analysed a number of times, both by citizens and the press: see the great site published by the Wall Street Journal and Ben Hamner's github repo (which is based on a Kattle dataset).

Some of my friends and colleagues have also done some work on this dataset in Neo4j - there's  this graphgist, Linkurio.us' blogpost, as well as Ryan Boyd's older article on DeveloperAdvocate. But I decided I was interested enough to take it for a spin.

Importing the email corpus into Neo4j

I got the dataset from this url, and it looks pretty straightforward. There's a very simple datamodel that we can work with, which would look something like this:

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 2 - This Month in Neo4j

Happy days, we have recorded the second episode of the second version of our Graphistania Neo4j community podcast.

In this chat between myself and Stefan Wendin, we talked about a bunch of cool articles in the This Week in Neo4j (TWIN4J) newsletter:

From the November 9th TWIN4J twin4j post

• Introducing Aura: https://neo4j.com/blog/introducing-neo4j-aura-a-new-graph-database-as-a-service/
• How to build a knowledge graph from scratch even if you are not really a full-blown developer
• Structural balance in graphs: https://medium.com/neo4j/understanding-alliances-exploring-structural-balance-with-neo4j-71fc08f10985

From the November 16th TWIN4J

• Into the multiverse: Exploring multiple scenarios for structural balance

From the November 23rd TWIN4j

• Building a graph analytics pipeline in Neo4j to explore the transport system in Rome
• Analysing online customer journeys in 3D

From the November 30th, 2019

• My own work on the Carrefour Shopping ticket analysis
• The fashion Knowledge Graph. Inferencing with Ontologies in Neo4j
• Decision trees in Neo4j: thepill

Here's the recorded chat:


And here's the transcription!

Part 4/4: Playing with the Carrefour shopping receipts

(Note: this post is part of a series - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 are all published!)

Alright here goes part 4 of 4 of my work on the Carrefour shopping receipts dataset. I realize we have come quite a way - and for me too there has been a lot to talk about and explore in these blogposts. Even then I feel like there's a ton of other interesting questions that we could ask and answer - but that would lead us too far.
Just to recap:

• In part 1 I wrangled the data, and imported it into Neo4j.
• In part 2 I was doing some simple but interesting queries on the data, just to get our feet wet and get a feel for the dataset.
• In part 3 we started doing some more interesting work - specifically around product combinations.

Now, in this final part of this series, I want to see if we can do some more analytical work with this dataset, for example by applying some algorithms to it. More specifically, I want to use some of our graph similarity algorithms to figure out which products are supposedly similar to one another - and do that along multiple axes. 

People have written long and complicated doctorates about the best way to calculate and establish similarities in graphs - and most of it is very much beyond me and my reptile math brain. But one thing is clear: many of the algorithms have very different approaches to doing this, and there are good reasons for wanting to choose or abandon one or the other. However, in our daily Neo4j work, we have seen some particularly interesting results with the Jaccard similarity algorithm, which is part of the algos plugin to Neo4j.

Jaccard similarity

The simple explanation of what Jaccard similarity does, is that it calculates a coefficient that compares members of two sets to see which members are shared and which are very different. So it's a measure of similarity for two sets of data - with a range from 0% (not similar at all) to 100% (identical). Higher scores mean higher similarity between the two populations. Jaccard similarity is sometimes referred to as "Intersection over Union", as explained like this:

I borrowed most of this explanation from the inevitable Wikipedia of course. You can find the Neo4j algo library that contains this algorithm over here.

Part 3/4: Playing with the Carrefour shopping receipts

(Note: this post is part of a series - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 are all published!)

Alright here goes part 3 of 4 of my work on the Carrefour shopping receipts dataset.

In part 1 I wrangled the data, and imported it into Neo4j. In part 2 I was doing some simple but interesting queries on the data, just to get our feet wet and get a feel for the dataset. Now in this article I want to do some more interesting work - specifically around product combinations. Which products are being bought together? Who is buying which combinations together? You can just sense that this would be some interesting stuff.

And I must say that this was quite an interesting "assignment". Originally, I wanted to actually look at all the combinations of products that we found in our dataset, and I wrote a nice little query for it:

//PLEASE DON'T RUN THIS QUERY!!!
call apoc.periodic.iterate("
match (p1:Product)<-[:TICKET_HAS_PRODUCT]-(t:Ticket)-[:TICKET_HAS_PRODUCT]->(p2:Product)
where id(p1)>id(p2)
return p1, p2","
merge (pc:ProductCombo {combo: p1.description+ ' with '+ p2.description, product1: p1.description, product2: p2.description})
on create set pc.frequency = 1
on match set pc.frequency = pc.frequency + 1
",
{batchsize:50000, iterateList: true, parallel: false})

In theory, this works just fine - and the db starts churning away and writing back ProductCombo nodes - but it never finishes. Or maybe I lost my patience :) ... but then I realised that the math is very much working against me: I have 53588 products in this dataset. If I remember my maths correctly, that means that

nCr = n(n - 1)(n - 2) ... (n - r + 1)/r! = n! / r!(n - r)!

I would have 53588! / (2! * 53586!) = 1435810078 combinations of products possible. See the StatTrek website for the calculator :) ... on top of that I realised that ALL of these combinations are probably not that interesting for us - maybe we should try to make this a bit more specific?