Frequent Subgraph Discovery

Abstract

Over the years, frequent itemset discovery algorithms have been used to solve various interesting problems. As data mining techniques are being increasingly applied to non-traditional domains, existing approaches for finding frequent itemsets cannot be used as they cannot model the requirement of these domains. An alternate way of modelingthe objects in these data sets, is to use a graph to model the database objects. Within that model, the problem of finding frequent patterns becomes that of discovering subgraphs that occur frequently over the entire set of graphs. In this paper we present a computationally efficient algorithm for finding all frequent subgraphs in large graph databases. We evaluated the performance of the algorithm by experiments with synthetic datasets as well as a chemical compound dataset. The empirical results show that our algorithm scales linearly with the number of input transactions and it is able to discover frequent subgraphs from a set of graph transactions reasonably fast, even though we have to deal with computationally hard problems such as canonical labeling of graphs and subgraph isomorphism which are not necessary for traditional frequent itemset discovery.