Ebook: Efficient Frequent Subtree Mining Beyond Forests

A common paradigm in distance-based learning is to embed the instance space into some appropriately chosen feature space equipped with a metric and to define the dissimilarity between instances by the distance of their images in the feature space. If the instances are graphs, then frequent connected subgraphs are a well-suited pattern language to define such feature spaces. Identifying the set of frequent connected subgraphs and subsequently computing embeddings for graph instances, however, is computationally intractable. As a result, existing frequent subgraph mining algorithms either restrict the structural complexity of the instance graphs or require exponential delay between the output of subsequent patterns. Hence distance-based learners lack an efficient way to operate on arbitrary graph data. To resolve this problem, in this thesis we present a mining system that gives up the demand on the completeness of the pattern set to instead guarantee a polynomial delay between subsequent patterns. Complementing this, we devise efficient methods to compute the embedding of arbitrary graphs into the Hamming space spanned by our pattern set. As a result, we present a system that allows to efficiently apply distance-based learning methods to arbitrary graph databases.

To overcome the computational intractability of the mining step, we consider only frequent subtrees for arbitrary graph databases. This restriction alone, however, does not suffice to make the problem tractable. We reduce the mining problem from arbitrary graphs to forests by replacing each graph by a polynomially sized forest obtained from a random sample of its spanning trees. This results in an incomplete mining algorithm. However, we prove that the probability of missing a frequent subtree pattern is low. We show empirically that this is true in practice even for very small sized forests. As a result, our algorithm is able to mine frequent subtrees in a range of graph databases where state-of-the-art exact frequent subgraph mining systems fail to produce patterns in reasonable time or even at all. Furthermore, the predictive performance of our patterns is comparable to that of exact frequent connected subgraphs, where available.

The above method considers polynomially many spanning trees for the forest, while many graphs have exponentially many spanning trees. The number of patterns found by our mining algorithm can be negatively influenced by this exponential gap. We hence propose a method that can (implicitly) consider forests of exponential size, while remaining computationally tractable. This results in a higher recall for our incomplete mining algorithm. Furthermore, the methods extend the known positive results on the tractability of exact frequent subtree mining to a novel class of transaction graphs. We conjecture that the next natural extension of our results to a larger transaction graph class is at least as difficult as proving whether P = NP, or not.

Regarding the graph embedding step, we apply a similar strategy as in the mining step. We represent a novel graph by a forest of its spanning trees and decide whether the frequent trees from the mining step are subgraph isomorphic to this forest. As a result, the embedding computation has one-sided error with respect to the exact subgraph isomorphism test but is computationally tractable. Furthermore, we show that we can leverage a partial order on the pattern set. This structure can be used to reduce the runtime of the embedding computation dramatically. For the special case of Jaccard-similarity between graph embeddings, a further substantial reduction of runtime can be achieved using min-hashing. The Jaccard-distance can be approximated using small sketch vectors that can be computed fast, again using the partial order on the tree patterns.