On the usefulness of weight-based constraints in frequent subgraph mining

Abstract

Frequent subgraph mining is an important data-mining technique. In this paper we look at weighted graphs, which are ubiquitous in the real world. The analysis of weights in combination with mining for substructures might yield more precise results. In particular, we study frequent subgraph mining in the presence of weight-based constraints and explain how to integrate them into mining algorithms. While such constraints only yield approximate mining results in most cases, we demonstrate that such results are useful nevertheless and explain this effect. To do so, we both assess the completeness of the approximate result sets, and we carry out application-oriented studies with real-world data-analysis problems: software-defect localization and explorative mining in transportation logistics. Our results are that the runtime can improve by a factor of up to 3.5 in defect localization and 7 in explorative mining. At the same time, we obtain an even slightly increased defect-localization precision and obtain good explorative mining results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited.