Book Image

Hands-On Graph Analytics with Neo4j

By : Estelle Scifo
Book Image

Hands-On Graph Analytics with Neo4j

By: Estelle Scifo

Overview of this book

Neo4j is a graph database that includes plugins to run complex graph algorithms. The book starts with an introduction to the basics of graph analytics, the Cypher query language, and graph architecture components, and helps you to understand why enterprises have started to adopt graph analytics within their organizations. You’ll find out how to implement Neo4j algorithms and techniques and explore various graph analytics methods to reveal complex relationships in your data. You’ll be able to implement graph analytics catering to different domains such as fraud detection, graph-based search, recommendation systems, social networking, and data management. You’ll also learn how to store data in graph databases and extract valuable insights from it. As you become well-versed with the techniques, you’ll discover graph machine learning in order to address simple to complex challenges using Neo4j. You will also understand how to use graph data in a machine learning model in order to make predictions based on your data. Finally, you’ll get to grips with structuring a web application for production using Neo4j. By the end of this book, you’ll not only be able to harness the power of graphs to handle a broad range of problem areas, but you’ll also have learned how to use Neo4j efficiently to identify complex relationships in your data.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Graph Modeling with Neo4j
5
Section 2: Graph Algorithms
10
Section 3: Machine Learning on Graphs
14
Section 4: Neo4j for Production

Pattern matching and data retrieval

The full power of graph databases, and Neo4j in particular, lies in their ability to go from one node to another by following relationships in a super-fast way. In this section, we explain how to read data from Neo4j through pattern matching and hence take full advantage of the graph structure.

Pattern matching

Let's take the following query:

MATCH ()-[r]-()
RETURN r

When we write these kinds of queries, we are actually performing what is called pattern matching with graph databases. The following schema explains this concept:

In this scenario, we have a directed graph made of nodes with labels A or B. We are looking for the sequence A -> B. Pattern matching consists of moving a stencil along the graph and seeing which pairs of nodes and relationships are consistent with it. On the first iteration, both the node labels and the relationship direction matches the search pattern. But on the second and third iterations, the node labels are not the...