Association rules with graph patterns

We propose graph-pattern association rules (GPARs) for social media marketing. Extending association rules for item-sets, GPARs help us discover regularities between entities in social graphs, and identify potential customers by exploring social influence. We study the problem of discovering top- k diversified GPARs. While this problem is NP-hard, we develop a parallel algorithm with accuracy bound. We also study the problem of identifying potential customers with GPARs. While it is also NP-hard, we provide a parallel scalable algorithm that guarantees a polynomial speedup over sequential algorithms with the increase of processors. Using real-life and synthetic graphs, we experimentally verify the scalability and effectiveness of the algorithms.