PBSM: An Efficient Top-K Subgraph Matching Algorithm

Top-K subgraph matching is one of the hot research issues in graph data management, which is to find, from the data graph, K subgraphs isomorphic to the query graph with the largest sum of weights. The existing methods of Top-K subgraph matching on large graphs usually use the filter-and-verify strategy. However, they all suffer from inefficiency in both stages. In the filtering stage, there exists repeated enumeration of vertices and the excessive memory cost of the filtering. In the verification stage, there exists redundant verification. Regarding to the above problems, we propose to use the preprocessing of the graph compression based on equivalent vertices to reduce the enumeration. In the filtering stage, we propose to reduce the memory cost by only considering the direct neighbors. In the verification stage, we take the vertex with the minimum number of candidate vertices in the query graph as the start vertex of the matching order, and use the idea of Ranking While Matching (RWM) to terminate the execution of the algorithm as early as possible by estimating the upper bound of the weights, so as to reduce redundant verification and improve the overall performance. Finally, the experimental results show that our method is much more efficient than existing methods in compression and the processing time.