This document discusses building a graph of U.S. businesses using Spark technologies. It describes how Radius Intelligence builds a comprehensive business graph from multiple data sources by acquiring and preparing raw data, clustering records, and constructing the graph by linking business and location vertices and attributes through techniques like connected components analysis. Key lessons learned include that GraphX scales well, graph construction and updates are easy using RDD operations, and connected components analysis is an expensive graph operation.

1. BUILDING A GRAPH OF ALL
U.S. BUSINESSES USING
SPARK TECHNOLOGIES.
Alexis Roos @alexisroos
Engineering manager / Lead Data Science Engineer
Radius Intelligence

2. AGENDA
• Radius Intelligence
• Objectives and terminology
• Business graph data pipeline
• Lessons learned
• Q&As
2

3. Radius Messaging Framework
June 8, 2015
Radius transforms the way B2B
marketers discover markets, acquire
customers, and measure success.
RADIUS INTELLIGENCE
Our software is powered by the
Radius Intelligence Cloud
a proprietary data science engine
which provides predictive analytics,
powerful segmentation, and
seamless integrations.
Predictive Marketing software

4. RADIUS INTELLIGENCE
➔ Founded in 2009
➔ 125+ employees (and growing)
➔ Headquartered in San Francisco, CA
➔ $125 million in funding to date
➔ Cutting edge in Data Science and Data
Engineering Technologies
4

5. Produce an accurate and comprehensive Business Graph from records coming from
dozens of sources comprising hundreds of data points such as:
BUSINESS GRAPH OBJECTIVE
5
…

6. Answer complex connected questions such as:
6
BUSINESS GRAPH BENEFITS
• Employees: Find engineering executives at a given company
focusing on Big Data or security
• News: Show News related to companies in my marketing segment
such as Funding announcements or mergers and acquisitions
• Intent: Show companies with a buying Intent for my product or
engineering managers looking for security product
• Organization: Show all locations or Employees for a given business
etc

7. o Business: a company or organization
ex: Blue Bottle company
BUSINESS GRAPH TERMINOLOGY
7
E I
N T
o Location: a business at a particular address
ex: Blue Bottle at Sansome St, San Francisco
o Attributes: information associated with a
business and/or location
ex: address, website, phone number, etc.
o Additional Data types:
ex: Employees, Intent, News, Technologies, etc.

8. BUSINESS GRAPH DATA PIPELINE
Data preparation Clustering ConstructionData acquisition
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Dozens sources
7B+ records
50B+ Data Points
• Crawling
• Licensing
Raw Records

9. BUSINESS GRAPH DATA PIPELINE
Data preparation Clustering ConstructionData acquisition
9
• Standardization
• Validation
• Normalization
Normalized RecordsRaw Records

10. BUSINESS GRAPH DATA PIPELINE
Data preparation Clustering ConstructionData acquisition
10
Cluster records on:
• Address
• Name of the business
• Websites
• Phone numbers
• Employees
• Description
• Category codes
• Etc.
Clusters of records by
address/business
Normalized Records

11. BUSINESS GRAPH DATA PIPELINE
Data preparation Clustering Construction
-­ Locations
-­ Businesses
& more
Data acquisition
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Construct Locations:
• Filter bad clusters
• Use all records in cluster to
create Location with attributes:
o Select best value(s)
o Score values: confidence
based on specific record
features including historical
o Impute missing values
• Etc.
Locations
MLLib
Clusters

12. BUSINESS GRAPH DATA PIPELINE
Data preparation ClusteringData acquisition Construction
Businesses
& more
12
Construct business & more:
• Create business and link
locations
• Add business level info:
news, employees, intent, etc.
• Correct/ impute fields at
business level
• Etc.
Locations Business graph
MLLib
E
I
N
T
E

13. GraphX models a “property graph” which is an multi directed, attributed graph.
SPARK / GRAPHX
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(1, Location) (2, Domain)
(1, 2, source1)
(3, Phone)
(1, 2, source2)
class Graph[VD, ED] {
val vertices: VertexRDD[VD]
val edges: EdgeRDD[ED]
val triplets: RDD[EdgeTriplet[VD, ED]]
}
VertexRDD[VD] extends RDD[(VertexID, VD)]
EdgeRDD[ED] extends RDD[Edge[ED]]
VD -­ Vertex data attribute type
ED -­ Edge data attribute type

14. Graph operations are like RDD operations: functional and lazily evaluated
SPARK / GRAPHX
14
Operations from Graph and GraphOps:
• Information: numEdges, numVertices, inDegrees, outDegrees, degrees
• Collections: vertices, edges, triplets
• Transformations and modifications: mapVertices, mapEdges, mapTriplets,
filter, reverse, subgraph, mask, groupEdges, convertToCanonicalEdges
• Join: joinVertices, outerJoinVertices
• Aggregations: collectNeighbor(Id)s, aggregateMessages, sendMsg, mergeMsg, tripletFields
• Caching and partitioning: persist, cache, checkpoint, unpersist(Vertices), partitionBy
• Graph algorithms: pregel, pageRank, connectedComponents, triangleCount
And data operations on VertexRDD and EdgeRDD:
• VertexRDD: filter, mapValues, minus, diff, innerJoin, leftJoin, aggregateUsingIndex
• EdgeRDD: mapValues, reverse, innerJoin

15. GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
Data preparation ClusteringData acquisition
Construct business graph:
• Create business and link
locations
• Add business level info:
news, employees, intent,
etc.
• Correct/ impute fields at
business level
• Etc.
Locations Business graph
Construction
Businesses
& more
15
E
I
N
T
E

16. 1. Create vertex for each location and each known business
GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
16
VertexRDD[Location]
Clusters
map
VertexRDD[Business]
Curated list
map

17. 2. Link Locations to Known Business per relationships (such as domain)
GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
flatMap
flatMap
attributes
Create
Edges
Location Business
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Locations
Businesses
join

18. 3. Create vertex for unique top attributes such as address, phone, domain, etc.
and link locations to these attributes
GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
flatMap
attributes
groupBy
Create
Vertices
& Edges
Location and attributes
18
Locations

19. Aggregate messages:
sendMsg, mergeMsg
SPARK / GRAPHX
Seq
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sendMsg: (srcID, name) mergeMsg: x ++ y
Location 1
Location 2
Domain
sendMsg mergeMsg

20. 4. Create location to location edges using attributes relationship and graph cutting
GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
Locations and attributes
aggregate
Messages
.combinations(2)
20
Locations
.filter(isSimilar) *
* such as name matching

21. Note: .combinations (2) and bottleneck
PERFORMANCE TIP
.combinations(2)
O(n): N^2
5
1
4
2
3
21
5
1
4
2
3
smarter combination
O(n): N
1 2 3 4 5

22. SPARK / GRAPHX
22
Connected components
Group 1
Group 2
connected
Components
Locations

23. 5. Call connected components on linked locations and create businesses
GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
connected
Components
Locations
Location Business
Create
Vertices
& Edges
23

24. GraphX Connected components implementation already performs optimizations:
– Incremental Updates to Mirror Caches
– Join Elimination
– Index Scanning for Active Sets
– Local Vertex and Edge Indices
– Index and Routing Table Reuse
But algorithm is iterative so optimization matters:
PERFORMANCE TIP
24
• Vertices and edges should be in memory: more efficient to
subset / keep the graph minimal or filter and rejoin later
• Check-­pointing improves performance (less lineage)

25. 6. More steps:
• Assign headquarter
• Join additional information: Employees, News, Intent, etc.
• Further corrections / imputations: attributes, revenues, etc.
GRAPH DATA PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION ZOOM IN
Location Business
more
operations
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Business graph
E
I
N
T
E

26. GRAPHICAL VIEW
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From Locations with attributes to Locations with Business

27. GRAPHICAL VIEW
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From Locations with attributes to Locations with Business

28. • Using a Graph allows us to naturally model business relationships
and append new data types over time. Also allowed us to debug data!
LESSONS LEARNED
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• GraphX scales: 250M vertices and 1b edges in clustering
• Creating and updating the graph is easy using RDD operations
• Edge cutting is an art as much as a science
• Connected Components is an expensive operation

29. THANK YOU.
WE ARE HIRING!
http://radius.com/jobs/
Alexis Roos
alexis@radius.com
@alexisroos