MultiRI: Fast Subgraph Matching in Labeled Multigraphs

Abstract: The Subgraph Matching (SM) problem consists of finding all the embeddings of a given small graph, called the query, into a large graph, called the target. The SM problem has been widely studied for simple graphs, i.e. graphs where there is exactly one edge between two nodes and nodes have single labels, but few approaches have been devised for labeled multigraphs, i.e. graphs having possibly multiple labels on nodes in which pair of nodes may have multiple labeled edges between them. Here we present MultiRI, a novel algorithm for the Sub-Multigraph Matching (SMM) problem, i.e. subgraph matching in labeled multigraphs. MultiRI improves on the state-of-the-art by computing compatibility domains and symmetry breaking conditions on query nodes to filter the search space of possible solutions. Empirically, we show that MultiRI outperforms the state-of-the-art method for the SMM problem in both synthetic and real graphs, with a multiplicative speedup between five and ten for large graphs, by using a limited amount of memory.