We present a new space-efficient method for counting and sampling triangles, and more generally, constant-sized cliques, in a massive graph whose edges arrive as a stream. When compared with prior work, our method yields significant improvements in the space complexity for these fundamental problems. This algorithm is extremely simple and easy to implement, and our experiments show very good practical performance on large graphs. We complement our triangle counting algorithm with a lower bound showing that the space complexity is close to optimal. We present extensions for the case of time-decay and multigraph streams.
By: A. Pavan, Kanat Tangwongsan, Srikanta Tirthapura, Kun-Lung Wu
Published in: RC25339 in 2012
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