NetLSD: Hearing the Shape of a Graph

Comparison among graphs is ubiquitous in graph analytics. However, it is a hard task in terms of the expressiveness of the employed similarity measure and the efficiency of its computation. Ideally, graph comparison should be invariant to the order of nodes and the sizes of compared graphs, adaptive to the scale of graph patterns, and scalable. Unfortunately, these properties have not been addressed together. Graph comparisons still rely on direct approaches, graph kernels, or representation-based methods, which are all inefficient and impractical for large graph collections. In this paper, we propose the Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor (NetLSD): the first, to our knowledge, permutation- and size-invariant, scale-adaptive, and efficiently computable graph representation method that allows for straightforward comparisons of large graphs. NetLSD extracts a compact signature that inherits the formal properties of the Laplacian spectrum, specifically its heat or wave kernel; thus, it hears the shape of a graph. Our evaluation on a variety of real-world graphs demonstrates that it outperforms previous works in both expressiveness and efficiency.Comment: KDD '18: The 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, August 19--23, 2018, London, United Kingdo

Convex Graph Invariant Relaxations For Graph Edit Distance

The edit distance between two graphs is a widely used measure of similarity that evaluates the smallest number of vertex and edge deletions/insertions required to transform one graph to another. It is NP-hard to compute in general, and a large number of heuristics have been proposed for approximating this quantity. With few exceptions, these methods generally provide upper bounds on the edit distance between two graphs. In this paper, we propose a new family of computationally tractable convex relaxations for obtaining lower bounds on graph edit distance. These relaxations can be tailored to the structural properties of the particular graphs via convex graph invariants. Specific examples that we highlight in this paper include constraints on the graph spectrum as well as (tractable approximations of) the stability number and the maximum-cut values of graphs. We prove under suitable conditions that our relaxations are tight (i.e., exactly compute the graph edit distance) when one of the graphs consists of few eigenvalues. We also validate the utility of our framework on synthetic problems as well as real applications involving molecular structure comparison problems in chemistry.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure