G-Finder: Approximate Attributed Subgraph Matching
Subgraph matching is a core primitive across a number of disciplines, ranging from data mining, databases, information retrieval, computer vision to natural language processing. Despite decades of efforts, it is still highly challenging to balance between the matching accuracy and the computational efficiency, especially when the query graph and/or the data graph are large. In this paper, we propose an index-based algorithm (G-FINDER) to find the top-k approximate matching subgraphs. At the heart of the proposed algorithm are two techniques, including (1) a novel auxiliary data structure (LOOKUP-TABLE) in conjunction with a neighborhood expansion method to effectively and efficiently index candidate vertices, and (2) a dynamic filtering and refinement strategy to prune the false candidates at an early stage. The proposed G-FINDER bears some distinctive features, including (1) generality, being able to handle different types of inexact matching (e.g., missing nodes, missing edges, intermediate vertices) on node attributed and/or edge attributed graphs or multigraphs; (2) effectiveness, achieving up to 30% F1-Score improvement over the best known competitor; and (3) efficiency, scaling near-linearly w.r.t. the size of the data graph as well as the query graph.
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Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10159289
Journal Name:
BigData
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
513 to 522
1. Attributed subgraph matching is a powerful tool for explorative mining of large attributed networks. In many applications (e.g., network science of teams, intelligence analysis, finance informatics), the user might not know what exactly s/he is looking for, and thus require the user to constantly revise the initial query graph based on what s/he finds from the current matching results. A major bottleneck in such an interactive matching scenario is the efficiency, as simply rerunning the matching algorithm on the revised query graph is computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we propose a family of effective and efficient algorithms (FIRST) to support interactive attributed subgraph matching. There are two key ideas behind the proposed methods. The first is to recast the attributed subgraph matching problem as a cross-network node similarity problem, whose major computation lies in solving a Sylvester equation for the query graph and the underlying data graph. The second key idea is to explore the smoothness between the initial and revised queries, which allows us to solve the new/updated Sylvester equation incrementally, without re-solving it from scratch. Experimental results show that our method can achieve (1) up to 16x speed-up when applying on networks with 6M$+$ nodes; (2) preserving moremore »