Synthetic Graph Generation at Scale : A novel framework for generating large graphs using clustering, generative models and node embeddings

Sammanfattning: The field of generative graph models has seen increased popularity during recent years as it allows us to model the underlying distribution of a network and thus recreate it. From allowing anonymization of sensitive information in social networks to data augmentation of rare diseases in the brain, the ability to generate synthetic data has multiple applications in various domains. However, most current methods face the bottleneck of trying to generate the entire adjacency matrix and are thus limited to graphs with less than tens of thousands of nodes. In contrast, large real-world graphs like social networks or transaction graphs can extend significantly beyond these boundaries. Furthermore, the current scalable approaches are predominantly based on stochasticity and do not capture local structures and communities. In this paper, we propose Graphwave Edge-Linking CELL or GELCELL, a novel three-step architecture for generating graphs at scale. First, instead of constructing the entire network, GELCELL partitions the data and generates each cluster separately, allowing for efficient and parallelizable training. Then, by encoding the nodes, it trains a classifier to predict the edges between the partitions to patch them together, creating a synthetic version of the original large graph. Although it does suffer from some limitations due to necessary constraints on the cluster sizes, the results showed that GELCELL, given optimized parameters, can produce graphs with reasonable accuracy on all data tested, with the largest having 400 000 nodes and 1 000 000 edges.