Substructure Similarity Search in Graph Databases

Advanced database systems face a great challenge raised by the emergence of massive, complex structural data in bioinformatics, chem-informatics, and many other applications. The most fundamental support needed in these applications is the efficient search of complex structured data. Since exact matching is often too restrictive, similarity search of complex structures becomes a vital operation that must be supported efficiently. In this paper, we investigate the issues of substructure similarity search using indexed features in graph databases. By transforming the edge relaxation ratio of a query graph into the maximum allowed missing features, our structural filtering algorithm, called Grafil, can filter many graphs without performing pairwise similarity computations. It is further shown that using either too few or too many features can result in poor filtering performance. Thus the challenge is to design an effective feature set selection strategy for filtering. By examining the e...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Xifeng Yan, Philip S. Yu, Jiawei Han
• Keywords: Database, Pairwise Similarity Computations, SIGMOD 2005, Structural Filtering Algorithm, Substructure Similarity Search