CFGM: An algorithm for closed frequent graph patterns mining

Abstract

The extraction of frequent subgraphs is a basic and well studied operation on graphs. Thus, mining frequent graph patterns and problems associated with it is very important. However, the number of frequent subgraphs is potentially exponential while mining large graph patterns. This issue can be partly overcome using closed frequent graphs mining. Instead of mining all frequent subgraphs, it is more efficient to enumerate only the closed frequent graphs. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel closed frequent subgraph mining algorithm: CFGM. In this algorithm, a stack-based architecture is used to enumerate the frequent graph represented by the depth-first search. Moreover, this algorithm defines a strict partial order among frequent graphs. We demonstrate that, with respect to this strict partial order, only maximal elements (frequent graphs) need to be discovered. A pruning strategy is developed based on this strict partial order that dramatically reduces unnecessary frequent subgraphs to be enumerated. Computational results show our algorithm displays excellent performance, especially for some large asymmetric frequent graph patterns.