Graph similarity search with edit distance constraint in large graph databases

Abstract

Due to many real applications of graph databases, it has become increasingly important to retrieve graphs g (in graph database D) that approximately match with query graph q, rather than exact subgraph matches. In this paper, we study the problem of graph similarity search, which retrieves graphs that are similar to a given query graph under the constraint of the minimum edit distance. Specifically, we derive a lower bound, branch-based bound, which can greatly reduce the search space of the graph similarity search. We also propose a tree index structure, namely b-tree, to facilitate effective pruning and efficient query processing. Extensive experiments confirm that our proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches by orders of magnitude, in terms of both pruning power and query response time.