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

Finding the shortest path based on distance

Spatial data and path finding algorithms are very much related. In this section, we are going to use a dataset representing the road network in New York, neo4j-spatial, and the GDS plugin (see Chapter 4, The Graph Data Science Library and Path Finding) to build a routing system.

The specifications for this routing application are the following:

  • The user will input the start and end locations as (latitude, longitude) tuples.
  • The system must return an ordered list of the streets the user needs to follow in order to go from his start to his end location by traveling the shortest distance.

Let's start by discovering and preparing the data.

Importing the data

In order to build a routing engine, we need a precise description of the road network in our area of interest. Luckily, the street network of New York is available as open data. You can find this file in the GitHub repository for this book, together with more information about its provenance...