Data-driven network alignment

Biological network alignment (NA) aims to find a node mapping between species' molecular networks that uncovers similar network regions, thus allowing for transfer of functional knowledge between the aligned nodes. However, current NA methods do not end up aligning functionally related nodes. A likely reason is that they assume it is topologically similar nodes that are functionally related. However, we show that this assumption does not hold well. So, a paradigm shift is needed with how the NA problem is approached. We redefine NA as a data-driven framework, TARA (daTA-dRiven network Alignment), which attempts to learn the relationship between topological relatedness and functional relatedness without assuming that topological relatedness corresponds to topological similarity, like traditional NA methods do. TARA trains a classifier to predict whether two nodes from different networks are functionally related based on their network topological patterns. We find that TARA is able to make accurate predictions. TARA then takes each pair of nodes that are predicted as related to be part of an alignment. Like traditional NA methods, TARA uses this alignment for the across-species transfer of functional knowledge. Clearly, TARA as currently implemented uses topological but not protein sequence information for this task. We find that TARA outperforms existing state-of-the-art NA methods that also use topological information, WAVE and SANA, and even outperforms or complements a state-of-the-art NA method that uses both topological and sequence information, PrimAlign. Hence, adding sequence information to TARA, which is our future work, is likely to further improve its performance

Capturing Topology in Graph Pattern Matching

Graph pattern matching is often defined in terms of subgraph isomorphism, an NP-complete problem. To lower its complexity, various extensions of graph simulation have been considered instead. These extensions allow pattern matching to be conducted in cubic-time. However, they fall short of capturing the topology of data graphs, i.e., graphs may have a structure drastically different from pattern graphs they match, and the matches found are often too large to understand and analyze. To rectify these problems, this paper proposes a notion of strong simulation, a revision of graph simulation, for graph pattern matching. (1) We identify a set of criteria for preserving the topology of graphs matched. We show that strong simulation preserves the topology of data graphs and finds a bounded number of matches. (2) We show that strong simulation retains the same complexity as earlier extensions of simulation, by providing a cubic-time algorithm for computing strong simulation. (3) We present the locality property of strong simulation, which allows us to effectively conduct pattern matching on distributed graphs. (4) We experimentally verify the effectiveness and efficiency of these algorithms, using real-life data and synthetic data.Comment: VLDB201

On Ranked Approximate Matching Of Large Attributed Graphs

Many emerging database applications entail sophisticated graph based query manipulation, predominantly evident in large-scale scientific applications. To access the information embedded in graphs, efficient graph matching tools and algorithms have become of prime importance. Although the prohibitively expensive time complexity associated with exact sub-graph isomorphism techniques has limited its efficacy in the application domain, approximate yet efficient graph matching techniques have received much attention due to their pragmatic applicability. Since public domain databases are noisy and incomplete in nature, inexact graph matching techniques have proven to be more promising in terms of inferring knowledge from numerous structural data repositories. Contemporary algorithms for approximate graph matching incur substantial cost to generate candidates, and then test and rank them for possible match. Leading algorithms balance processing time and overall resource consumption cost by leveraging sophisticated data structures and graph properties to improve overall performance. In this dissertation, we propose novel techniques for approximate graph matching based on two different techniques called TraM or Top-k Graph Matching and Approximate Network Matching or AtoM respectively. While TraM off-loads a significant amount of its processing on to the database making the approach viable for large graphs, AtoM provides improved turn around time by means of graph summarization prior to matching. The summarization process is aided by domain sensitive similarity matrices, which in turn helps improve the matching performance. The vector space embedding of the graphs and efficient filtration of the search space enables computation of approximate graph similarity at a throw-away cost. We combine domain similarity and topological similarity to obtain overall graph similarity and compare them with neighborhood biased segments of the data-graph for proper matches. We show that our approach can naturally support the emerging trend in graph pattern queries and discuss its suitability for large networks as it can be seamlessly transformed to adhere to map-reduce framework. We have conducted thorough experiments on several synthetic and real data sets, and have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method