Succinct Graph Representations as Distance Oracles: An Experimental Evaluation

Distance oracles answer shortest-path queries between any pair of nodes in a graph. They are often built using succinct graph representations such as spanners, sketches, and compressors to minimize oracle size and query answering latency. Node embeddings, in particular, offer graph representations that place adjacent nodes nearby each other in a low-rank space. However, their use in the design of distance oracles has not been sufficiently studied. In this paper, we empirically compare exact distance oracles constructed based on a variety of node embeddings and other succinct representations. We evaluate twelve such oracles along three measures of efficiency: construction time, memory requirements, and query-processing time over fourteen real datasets and four synthetic graphs. We show that distances between embedding vectors are excellent estimators of graph distances when graphs are well-structured, but less so for more unstructured graphs. Overall, our findings suggest that exact oracles based on embeddings can be constructed faster than multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) but slower than compressed adjacency indexes, require less memory than landmark oracles but more than sparsifiers or indexes, can answer queries faster than indexes but slower than MDS, and are exact more often with a smaller additive error than spanners (that have multiplicative error) while not being lossless like adjacency lists. Finally, while the exactness of such oracles is infeasible to maintain for huge graphs even under large amounts of resources, we empirically demonstrate that approximate oracles based on GOSH embeddings can efficiently scale to graphs of 100M+ nodes with only small additive errors in distance estimations.