Efficient Mining of Frequent Subgraphs with Two-Vertex Exploration

Frequent Subgraph Mining (FSM) is the key task in many graph mining and machine learning applications. Numerous systems have been proposed for FSM in the past decade. Although these systems show good performance for small patterns (with no more than four vertices), we found that they have difficulty in mining larger patterns. In this work, we propose a novel two-vertex exploration strategy to accelerate the mining process. Compared with the single-vertex exploration adopted by previous systems, our two-vertex exploration avoids the large memory consumption issue and significantly reduces the memory access overhead. We further enhance the performance through an index-based quick pattern technique that reduces the overhead of isomorphism checks, and a subgraph sampling technique that mitigates the issue of subgraph explosion. The experimental results show that our system achieves significant speedups against the state-of-the-art graph pattern mining systems and supports larger pattern mining tasks that none of the existing systems can handle.