Survey of Graph Analysis Applications

Recently, many systems for graph analysis have been developed to address the growing needs of both industry and academia to study complex graphs. Insight into the practical uses of graph analysis will allow future developments of such systems to optimize for real-world usage, instead of targeting single use cases or hypothetical workloads. This insight may be derived from surveys on the applications of graph analysis. However, existing surveys are limited in the variety of application domains, datasets, and/or graph analysis techniques they study. In this work we present and apply a systematic method for identifying practical use cases of graph analysis. We identify commonly used graph features and analysis methods and use our findings to construct a taxonomy of graph analysis applications. We conclude that practical use cases of graph analysis cover a diverse set of graph features and analysis methods. Furthermore, most applications combine multiple features and methods. Our findings motivate further development of graph analysis systems to support a broader set of applications and to facilitate the combination of multiple analysis methods in an (interactive) workflow.