Neo4J find route thru more points - neo4j

I am creating simple graph db for tranportation between few cities. My structure is:
Station = physical station
Stop = each station has several stops, depend on time and line ID
Ride = connection between stops
I need to find route from city A to city C, but i has no direct stopconnection, but they are connected thru city B. see picture please, as new user i cant post images to question.
How can I get router from City A with STOP 1 connect RIDE 1 to STOP 2 then
STOP 2 connected by same City B to STOP3 and finnaly from STOP3 by RIDE2 to STOP4 (City C)?
Thank you.
UPDATE
Solution from Vince is ok, but I need set filter to STOP nodes for departure time, something like
MATCH p=shortestPath((a:City {name:'A'})-[*{departuretime>xxx}]-(c:City {name:'C'})) RETURN p
Is possible to do without iterations all matches collection? because its to slow.

If you are simply looking for a single route between two nodes, this Cypher query will return the shortest path between two City nodes, A and C.
MATCH p=shortestPath((a:City {name:'A'})-[*]-(c:City {name:'C'})) RETURN p
In general if you have a lot of potential paths in your graph, you should limit the search depth appropriately:
MATCH p=shortestPath((a:City {name:'A'})-[*..4]-(c:City {name:'C'})) RETURN p
If you want to return all possible paths you can omit the shortestPath clause:
MATCH p=(a:City {name:'A'})-[*]-(c:City) {name:'C'}) RETURN p
The same caveats apply. See the Neo4j documentation for full details
Update
After your subsequent comment.
I'm not sure what the exact purpose of the time property is here, but it seems as if you actually want to create the shortest weighted path between two nodes, based on some minimum time cost. This is different of course to shortestPath, because that minimises on the number of edges traversed only, not the cost of those edges.
You'd normally model the traversal cost on edges, rather than nodes, but your graph has time only on the STOP nodes (and not for example on the RIDE edges, or the CITY nodes). To make a shortest weighted path query work here, we'd need to also model time as a property on all nodes and edges. If you make this change, and set the value to 0 for all nodes / edges where it isn't relevant then the following Cypher query does what I think you need.
MATCH p=(a:City {name: 'A'})-[*]-(c:City {name:'C'})
RETURN p AS shortestPath,
reduce(time=0, n in nodes(p) | time + n.time) AS m,
reduce(time=0, r in relationships(p) | time + r.time) as n
ORDER BY m + n ASC
LIMIT 1
In your example graph this produces a least cost path between A and C:
(A)->(STOP1)-(STOP2)->(B)->(STOP5)->(STOP6)->(C)
with a minimum time cost of 230.
This path includes two stops you have designated "bad", though I don't really understand why they're bad, because their traversal costs are less than other stops that are not "bad".
Or, use Dijkstra
This simple Cypher will probably not be performant on densely connected graphs. If you find that performance is a problem, you should use the REST API and the path endpoint of your source node, and request a shortest weighted path to the target node using Dijkstra's algorithm. Details here

Ah ok, if the requirement is to find paths through the graph where the departure time at every stop is no earlier than the departure time of the previous stop, this should work:
MATCH p=(:City {name:'A'})-[*]-(:City {name:'C'})
MATCH (a:Stop) where a in nodes(p)
MATCH (b:Stop) where b in nodes(p)
WITH p, a, b order by b.time
WITH p as ps, collect(distinct a) as as, collect(distinct b) as bs
WHERE as = bs
WITH ps, last(as).time - head(as).time as elapsed
RETURN ps, elapsed ORDER BY elapsed ASC
This query works by matching every possible path, and then collecting all the stops on each matched path twice over. One of these collections of stops is ordered by departure time, while the other is not. Only if the two collections are equal (i.e. number and order) is the path admitted to the results. This step evicts invalid routes. Finally, the paths themselves are ordered by least elapsed time between the first and last stop, so the quickest route is first in the list.
Normal warnings about performance, etc. apply :)

Related

NEO4j Cypher query to return paths with a condition on the number of connected nodes

I would like to clean up my graph database a bit by removing unnecessary nodes. In one case, unnecessary nodes are nodes B between nodes A and C where B has the same name as node C and NO OTHER incoming relationships. I am having trouble coming up with a Cypher query that restricts the number of incoming edges.
The first part was easy:
MATCH (n1:TypeA)<-[r1:Inside]-(n2:TypeB)<-[r2:Inside]-(n3:TypeC)
WHERE n2.name = n3.name
Based on other SE questions (especially this one) I then tried doing something like:
WITH n2, collect(r2) as rr
WHERE length(rr) = 1
RETURN n2
but this also returned nodes with more than one incoming edge. It seems my WHERE clause on the length is not filtering the returned n2 nodes. I tried a few other things I found online, but they either returned nothing or were no
longer syntactically correct in the current version.
After I find the n2 nodes that match the pattern, I'll want to connect n3 directly to n1 and DETACH DELETE n2. Again, I was easily able to do that part when I didn't need the restriction on the number of incoming edges to n2. That previous question has FOREACH (r IN rr | DELETE r), but I want to detach delete the n2 nodes, not just those edges. I don't know how to correctly adapt this to operating on the nodes attached to the rs and I certainly want to be sure it's finding the correct nodes before deleting anything since Neo4j lacks basic undo functionality (but you can't put a RETURN command inside a FOREACH for some crazy reason).
How do I filter nodes on a path by the number of incoming edges using Cypher?
I think I can do this in py2neo by first collecting all the n1,n2,n3 triples matching the pattern, then going through each returned record and add them to a list if n2 has only one incoming edge. Then go through that list and perform the trimming operation, but if this can be done in pure Cypher, then I'd like to know how because I have a number of similar adjustments to make.
You need to pass along path in your WITH statement.
MATCH path = (n1:Ward)<-[r1:PARTOF]-(n2:Unknown)<-[r2:PARTOF]-(n3:Chome)
WHERE n2.name = n3.name
WITH path, size((n2)<-[:PARTOF]-()) as degree
WHERE degree = 1
RETURN path
Or shorter like this:
MATCH path = (n1:Ward)<-[r1:PARTOF]-(n2:Unknown)<-[r2:PARTOF]-(n3:Chome)
WHERE n2.name = n3.name
AND size((n2)<-[:PARTOF]-()) = 1
RETURN path
Borrowing some insight from this answer I came up with a kludge that seems to work.
MATCH path = (n1:Ward)<-[r1:PARTOF]-(n2:Unknown)<-[r2:PARTOF]-(n3:Chome)
WHERE n2.name = n3.name
WITH n2, size((n2)<-[:PARTOF]-()) as degree
WHERE degree = 1
MATCH (n1:Ward)<-[r1:PARTOF]-(n2:Unknown)<-[r2:PARTOF]-(n3:Chome)
RETURN n1,n2,n3
I expect that not all parts of that are needed and it isn't an efficient solution, but I don't know enough yet to improve upon it.
For example, I define the first line as path, but I can't use MATCH path in the penultimate line, and I have no idea why.
Also, if I write WITH size((n2)<-[:PARTOF]-()) as degree (dropping the n2, after WITH) it returns not only the n2 with degree > 1, but also all the nodes connected to them (even more than the n3 nodes). I don't know why it behaves like this and the Neo4j documentation for WITH has no examples or description to help me understand why the n2 is necessary here. Any improvements to my Cypher query or explanation of how or why it works would be greatly appreciated.

why is neo4j so slow on this cypher query?

I have a fairly deep tree that consists of an initial "transaction" node (call that the 0th layer of the tree), from which there are 50 edges to the next nodes (call it the 1st later of the tree), and then from each of those around 35 on average to the second layer, and so on...
The initial node is a :txnEvent and all the rest are :mEvent
mEvent nodes have 4 properties, one of them called channel_name
Now, I would like to retrieve all paths that go down to the 4th layer such that those paths contain a node with channel_name==A and also channel_name==B
This query:
match (n: txnEvent)-[r:TO*1..4]->(m:mEvent) return COUNT(*);
Is telling me there are only 1,667,444 paths to consider.
However, the following query:
MATCH p = (n:txnEvent)-[:TO*1..4]->(m:mEvent)
WHERE ANY(k IN nodes(p) WHERE k.channel_name='A')
AND ANY(k IN nodes(p) WHERE k.channel_name='B')
RETURN
EXTRACT (n in nodes(p) | n.channel_name),
EXTRACT (n in nodes(p) | n.step),
EXTRACT (n in nodes(p) | n.event_type),
EXTRACT (n in nodes(p) | n.event_device),
EXTRACT (r in relationships(p) | r.weight )
Takes almost 1 minute to execute (neo4j's UI on port 7474)
For completness, neo4j is telling me:
"Started streaming 125517 records after 2 ms and completed after 50789 ms, displaying first 1000 rows."
So I'm wondering whether there's something obvious I'm missing. All of the properties that nodes have are indexed by the way. Is the query slow, or is it fast and the streaming is slow?
UDATE:
This query, that doesn't stream data back:
MATCH p = (n:txnEvent)-[:TO*1..4]->(m:mEvent)
WHERE ANY(k IN nodes(p) WHERE k.channel_name='A')
AND ANY(k IN nodes(p) WHERE k.channel_name='B')
RETURN
COUNT(*)
Takes 35s, so even though it's faster, presumably because no data is returned, I feel it's still quite slow.
UPDATE 2:
Ideally this data should go into a jupyter notebook with a python kernel.
Thanks for the PROFILE plan.
Keep in mind that the query you're asking for is a difficult one to process. Since you want paths where at least one node in the path has one property and at least one other node in the path has another property, there is no way to prune paths during expansion. Instead, every possible path has to be determined, and then every node in each of those 1.6 million paths has to be accessed to check for the property (and that has to be done twice for each path, for both properties). Thus the ~10 million db hits for the filter operation.
You could try expanding your heap and pagecache sizes (if you have the RAM to spare), but I don't see any easy ways to tune this query.
As for your question about the query time vs streaming, the problem is the query itself. The message you saw means that the first result was found extremely quickly so the first result was ready in the stream almost immediately. Results are added to the stream as they're found, but the volume of paths needing to be matched and filtered with no ability to prune paths during expansion means it took a very long time for the query to complete.

Neo4j Cypher: check attributes of not consecutive nodes in path

I have got a graph that represents several bus/train stops in different cities.
Lets assume I want to go from city A (with stops a1, a2, a3...) to city Z (with stops z1, z2...)
There are several routes (relations) between the nodes and I want to get all paths between the start and the end node. My cost vector would be complex (travel time and waiting time and price and and and...) in reality, therefore I cannot use shortestpaths etc. I managed to write a (quite complex) query that does what I want: In general it is looking for each match with start A and end Z that is available.
I try to avoid looping by filter out results with special characteristics, e. g.
MATCH (from{name:'a1'}), (to{name:'z1'}),
path = (from)-[:CONNECTED_TO*0..8]->(to)
WHERE ALL(b IN NODES(path) WHERE SINGLE(c IN NODES(path) WHERE b = c))
Now I want to avoid the possiblity to visit one city more than once, e. g. instead of a1-->a2-->d2-->d4-->a3-->a4-->z1 I want to get a1-->a4-->z1.
Therefore I have to check all nodes in the path. If the value of n.city is the same for consecutive nodes, everything is fine. But If I got a path with nodes of the same city that are not consecutive, e. g. cityA--> cityB-->cityA I want to throw away that path.
How can I do that? Is something possible?
I know, that is not really a beatiful approach, but I invested quite a lot of time in finding a better one without throwing away the whole data structure but I could not find one. Its just a prototype and Neo4j is not my focus. I want to test some tools and products to build some knowledge. I will go ahead with a better approach next time.
Interesting question. The important thing to observe here is that a path that never revisits a city (after leaving it) must have fewer transitions between cities than the number of distinct cities. For example:
AABBC (a "good" path) has 3 distinct cities and 2 transitions
ABBAC (a "bad" path) also has 3 distinct cities but 3 transitions
With this observation in mind, the following query should work (even if the start and end nodes are the same):
MATCH path = ({name:'a1'})-[:CONNECTED_TO*0..8]->({name:'z1'})
WITH path, NODES(path) as ns
WITH path, ns,
REDUCE(s = {cnt: 0, last: ns[0].city}, x IN ns[1..] |
CASE WHEN x.city = s.last THEN s ELSE {cnt: s.cnt+1, last: x.city} END).cnt AS nTransitions
UNWIND ns AS node
WITH path, nTransitions, COUNT(DISTINCT node.city) AS nCities
WHERE nTransitions < nCities
RETURN path;
The REDUCE function is used to calculate the number of transitions in a path.

Shortest Paths with Cost Property

I want to look up the top 5 (shortest) path in my graph (Neo4j 3.0.4) from point A to point Z.
The graph consists several nodes that are connected by the relation "CONNECTED_BY". This connection has a cost property that should be minimized.
I started with this:
MATCH p=(from:Stop{stopId:'A'}), (to:Stop{stopUri:'Z'}),
path = allShortestPaths((from)-[:CONNECTED_TO*]->(to))
WITH REDUCE (total = 0, r in relationships(p) | total + r.cost) as tt, path
RETURN path, tt
This query returns always the subgraph with the least hops, the cost property is not considered. There exists another subgraph with more hops that has a lower total cost. What I am doing wrong?
Furthermore, I acutally want to get the TOP 5 subgraphs. If I execute this query:
MATCH p=(from:Stop{stopUri:'A'})-[r:CONNECTED_TO*10]->(to:Stop{stopUri:'Z'}) RETURN p
I can see several paths, but the first one just returns one path.
The path should not contain loops etc. of course.
I want to execute this query via REST API, so a REST Call or cyhper query should do it.
EDIT1:
I want to execute this as REST Call, so I tried the dijkstra algorithm. This seems to be a good way, but I have to calculate the weight by adding 3 different cost properties in the relation. How this could be achieved?
allShortestPaths will find the shortest path between two points and then match every path that has the same number of hops. If you want to minimize based on cost rather than traversal length, try something like this:
MATCH p=(from:Stop{stopId:'A'}), (to:Stop{stopUri:'Z'}),
path = (from)-[:CONNECTED_TO*]->(to)
WITH REDUCE (total = 0, r in relationships(p) | total + r.cost) as cost, path
ORDER BY cost
RETURN path LIMIT 5

Pairs from a directed acyclic Neo4j graph

I have a DAG which for the most part is a tree... but there are a few cycles in it. I mention it in case it matters.
I have to translate the graph into pairs of relations. If:
A -> B
C
D -> 1
2 -> X
Y
Then I would produce ArB, ArC, arD, Dr1, Dr2, 2rX, 2rY, where r is some relationship information (in other words, the query cannot totally ignore it.)
Also, in my graph, node A has many cousins, so I need to 'anchor' my query to A.
My current attempt generates all possible pairs, so I get many unhelpful pairs such as ArY since A can eventually traverse to Y.
What is a query that starts (or ends) with A, that returns a list of pairs? I don't want to query Neo individually for each node - I want to get the list in one shot if possible.
The query would be great, doc pages that explain would be great. Any help is appreciated.
EDIT Here's what I have so far, using Frobber's post as inspiration:
1. MATCH p=(n {id:"some_id"})-[*]->(m)
2. WITH DISTINCT(NODES(p)) as zoot
3. MATCH (x)-[r]->(y)
4. WHERE x IN zoot AND y IN zoot
5. RETURN DISTINCT x, TYPE(r) as r, y
Where in line 1, I make a path that includes all the nodes under the one I care about.
In line 2, I start a new match that is intended to return my pairs
Line 3, I convert the path of nodes to a collection of nodes
Line 4, I accept only x and y nodes that were scooped up the first match. I am not sure why I have to include y in the condition, but it seems to matter.
Line 5, I return the results. I do not know why I need a distinct here. I thought the one on line 3 would do the trick.
So far, this is working for me. I have no insight into its performance in a large graph.
Here's an approach to try - this query is modeled off of the sample matrix data you can find online so you can play with it before adapting it to your schema.
MATCH p=(n:Crew)-[r:KNOWS*]-m
WHERE n.name='Neo'
WITH p, length(nodes(p)) AS nCount, length(relationships(p)) AS rCount
RETURN nodes(p)[nCount-2], relationships(p)[rCount-1], nodes(p)[nCount-1];
ORDER BY length(p) ASC;
A couple of notes about what's going on here:
Consider the "Neo" node (n.name="Neo") to be your "A" here. You're rooting this path traversal in some particular node you pick out.
We're matching paths, not nodes or edges.
We're going through all paths rooted at the A node, ordering by path length. This gets the near nodes before the distant nodes.
For each path we find, we're looking at the nodes and relationships in the path, and then returning the last pair. The second-to-last node (nodes(p)[nCount-2]) and the last relationship in the path (relationships(p)[rCount-1]).
This query basically returns the node, the relationship, and the connected node showing that you can get those items; from there you just customize the query to pull out whatever about those nodes/rels you might need pursuant to your schema.
The basic formula starts with matching p=(someNode {startingPoint: "A"})-[r:*]->(otherStuff); from there it's just processing paths as you go.

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