Welcome to this week in Neo4j where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph databases in the last 7 days.
This week we have Deep Feature Learning for Graphs with the DeepGL algorithm, Decision Trees, Customer Journey Analytics, Data Vault in Neo4j, the GA of Neo4j-OGM 3.1.3, a fascinating post about NBA champions, and more!
Featured Community Member: Reshama Shaikh
This week’s featured community member is Reshama Shaikh.
Reshama Shaikh – This Week’s Featured Community Member
Reshama is a bio statistician and data scientist. She is also a organizer of the meetup groups Women in Machine Learning and Data Science NYC and the NYC PyLadies
We met Reshama last year at GraphConnect when we hosted a Women in Data Science meetup together. This year, Reshama attended the conference, participated in a panel on ‘Welcoming Diversity’ for our Ecosystem Summit, and co-hosted GraphHack: Technology Buzz Word Bingo!
Reshama has been a great supporter of the Neo4j community and we grateful for all that she has done. Reshama also wrote a great blog on her GraphConnect experience this year!
On behalf of the Neo4j community, thanks for all your work Reshama!
Graph-Based Customer Journey Analytics with Neo4j
On Thursday Jesús Barrasa presented a webinar, in which he showed how Neo4j can be used for Customer Journey Analytics.
Jesus shows how we can explore our customer data and execute high level churn analysis as well as testing basic hypotheses using a combination of the Cypher query language and Neo4j Bloom visualization tool.
If you want to see a more extensive worked example of this technique, Adam Cowley wrote a post a few months ago showing how to analyse Google Analytics data with Neo4j.
Decision Trees in Neo4j
Max De Marzi shared the slides from his GraphConnect talk – Decision Trees in Neo4j, Building dynamic expert systems and rules engines.
In the talk Max shows how to build a dynamic rules engine that’s able to determine whether a person should be allowed to enter a bar or not.
Max achieves this using Neo4j’s Traversal framework – an API that gives you very fine grained control over graph traversals. It’s all then neatly packaged in a user defined procedure.
You can read more about Max’s approach in a couple of blog posts he wrote in early 2018:
Data Vault on Neo4j, SDN Release, GraphQL on CodeSandbox Containers
- Kate Loguteva has written a blog post showing how to implement Data Vault (a methodology for building data warehouses) in Neo4j.
- Michael Simons has written a blog post titled Spring Data Lovelace & Neo4j-OGM 3.1.3 went GA. In the post Michael goes through the new features in Neo4j-OGM, including an improved loading mechanism, better handling of class hierarchies, and nested property filter support. He also describes new features in Spring Data Neo4j 5.1 Lovelace, such as the introduction of Persistence constructors and auditing support.
- Will Lyon created a GraphQL server with Apollo using the brand new CodeSandbox Containers. Will’s example server uses neo4j-graphql-js to generate database queries from GraphQL type definitions.
DeepGL on Neo4j – Deep Feature Learning for Graphs
We’ve heard a lot of interest in running graph embedding algorithms on Neo4j and over the last few months Pete Meltzer and I have written a user defined procedure that implements the DeepGL algorithm.
One of the things we liked about this algorithm is that it’s designed to keep memory usage low and also returns the names of the features that it comes up with, which is helpful for model understanding.
We’re using the nd4j library to do matrix calculations and Pete spent a lot of time working out how to fine tune our use of that library so big thanks to him for that!
You can download the code for the algorithm from our experimental ml-models GitHub repository.
We’d love to hear if the algorithm is useful as part of your machine learning workflow, so let us know how you get on by sending an email to devrel@neo4j.com or p.meltzer@braintree.com.
Teammates of Champions, Causal Cluster on AWS, Graphs for Software Analytics
- I came across a fascinating blog post written by Erik Germani looking at the teammates of NBA champions. Erik observes that since 1983, every NBA champion has featured a player who was on the same team as Shaquille O’Neal at some point in their career. He then uses Neo4j to find other players who have similarly long streaks of being teammates with the champions.
- Neo4j 3.4.7 enterprise causal cluster update is live on AWS Marketplace. WIth just a few clicks and under five minutes you can get a graph cluster up and running.
- The slides of the paper Towards an Open Source Stack to Create a Unified Data Source for Software Analysis and Visualization that Richard Müller, Dirk Mahler, Michael Hunger, Jens Nerche and Markus Harrer presented at IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization are now available.
- jQAssistant have launched the JQAssistant Dashboard, which was recently presented at as presented at IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization. This dashboard allows Interactive visualization of software structures and metrics.
Next Week
What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?
| Date | Title | Group |
|---|---|---|
October 4th 2018 |
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was by Anthony J Clink:
I used neo4j to do some incredible things. On a personal project I was able to graph real time strategy video game build paths. In a production project I was able to determine the quality of a star schema in a BI shop. A graph is a truly wonderful data structure.
— Anthony J Clink (@AnthonyJClink) September 22, 2018
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Cheers, Mark
