Efficient Mining of Frequent Subgraph with Connectivity Constraint

  • Moon, Hyun-S. (Division of Computer Science, KAIST) ;
  • Lee, Kwang-H. (Department of Biosystems, KAIST) ;
  • Lee, Do-Heon (Department of Biosystems, KAIST)
  • Published : 2005.09.22

Abstract

The goal of data mining is to extract new and useful knowledge from large scale datasets. As the amount of available data grows explosively, it became vitally important to develop faster data mining algorithms for various types of data. Recently, an interest in developing data mining algorithms that operate on graphs has been increased. Especially, mining frequent patterns from structured data such as graphs has been concerned by many research groups. A graph is a highly adaptable representation scheme that used in many domains including chemistry, bioinformatics and physics. For example, the chemical structure of a given substance can be modelled by an undirected labelled graph in which each node corresponds to an atom and each edge corresponds to a chemical bond between atoms. Internet can also be modelled as a directed graph in which each node corresponds to an web site and each edge corresponds to a hypertext link between web sites. Notably in bioinformatics area, various kinds of newly discovered data such as gene regulation networks or protein interaction networks could be modelled as graphs. There have been a number of attempts to find useful knowledge from these graph structured data. One of the most powerful analysis tool for graph structured data is frequent subgraph analysis. Recurring patterns in graph data can provide incomparable insights into that graph data. However, to find recurring subgraphs is extremely expensive in computational side. At the core of the problem, there are two computationally challenging problems. 1) Subgraph isomorphism and 2) Enumeration of subgraphs. Problems related to the former are subgraph isomorphism problem (Is graph A contains graph B?) and graph isomorphism problem(Are two graphs A and B the same or not?). Even these simplified versions of the subgraph mining problem are known to be NP-complete or Polymorphism-complete and no polynomial time algorithm has been existed so far. The later is also a difficult problem. We should generate all of 2$^n$ subgraphs if there is no constraint where n is the number of vertices of the input graph. In order to find frequent subgraphs from larger graph database, it is essential to give appropriate constraint to the subgraphs to find. Most of the current approaches are focus on the frequencies of a subgraph: the higher the frequency of a graph is, the more attentions should be given to that graph. Recently, several algorithms which use level by level approaches to find frequent subgraphs have been developed. Some of the recently emerging applications suggest that other constraints such as connectivity also could be useful in mining subgraphs : more strongly connected parts of a graph are more informative. If we restrict the set of subgraphs to mine to more strongly connected parts, its computational complexity could be decreased significantly. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to mine frequent subgraphs that are more strongly connected. Experimental study shows that the algorithm is scaling to larger graphs which have more than ten thousand vertices.

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