• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.125-132
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• 2014

Since frequent pattern mining was proposed in order to search for hidden, useful pattern information from large-scale databases, various types of mining approaches and applications have been researched. Especially, frequent graph pattern mining was suggested to effectively deal with recent data that have been complicated continually, and a variety of efficient graph mining algorithms have been studied. Graph patterns obtained from graph databases have their own importance and characteristics different from one another according to the elements composing them and their lengths. However, traditional frequent graph pattern mining approaches have the limitations that do not consider such problems. That is, the existing methods consider only one minimum support threshold regardless of the lengths of graph patterns extracted from their mining operations and do not use any of the patterns' weight factors; therefore, a large number of actually useless graph patterns may be generated. Small graph patterns with a few vertices and edges tend to be interesting when their weighted supports are relatively high, while large ones with many elements can be useful even if their weighted supports are relatively low. For this reason, we propose a weight-based frequent graph pattern mining algorithm considering length-decreasing support constraints. Comprehensive experimental results provided in this paper show that the proposed method guarantees more outstanding performance compared to a state-of-the-art graph mining algorithm in terms of pattern generation, runtime, and memory usage.