English

Mining Patterns in Networks using Homomorphism

Data Structures and Algorithms 2015-03-19 v1 Social and Information Networks Physics and Society

Abstract

In recent years many algorithms have been developed for finding patterns in graphs and networks. A disadvantage of these algorithms is that they use subgraph isomorphism to determine the support of a graph pattern; subgraph isomorphism is a well-known NP complete problem. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach which mines tree patterns in networks by using subgraph homomorphism. The advantage of homomorphism is that it can be computed in polynomial time, which allows us to develop an algorithm that mines tree patterns in arbitrary graphs in incremental polynomial time. Homomorphism however entails two problems not found when using isomorphism: (1) two patterns of different size can be equivalent; (2) patterns of unbounded size can be frequent. In this paper we formalize these problems and study solutions that easily fit within our algorithm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1110.3225,
  title  = {Mining Patterns in Networks using Homomorphism},
  author = {Anton Dries and Siegfried Nijssen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.3225},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:20:21.965Z