8 research outputs found
Graph matching: relax or not?
We consider the problem of exact and inexact matching of weighted undirected
graphs, in which a bijective correspondence is sought to minimize a quadratic
weight disagreement. This computationally challenging problem is often relaxed
as a convex quadratic program, in which the space of permutations is replaced
by the space of doubly-stochastic matrices. However, the applicability of such
a relaxation is poorly understood. We define a broad class of friendly graphs
characterized by an easily verifiable spectral property. We prove that for
friendly graphs, the convex relaxation is guaranteed to find the exact
isomorphism or certify its inexistence. This result is further extended to
approximately isomorphic graphs, for which we develop an explicit bound on the
amount of weight disagreement under which the relaxation is guaranteed to find
the globally optimal approximate isomorphism. We also show that in many cases,
the graph matching problem can be further harmlessly relaxed to a convex
quadratic program with only n separable linear equality constraints, which is
substantially more efficient than the standard relaxation involving 2n equality
and n^2 inequality constraints. Finally, we show that our results are still
valid for unfriendly graphs if additional information in the form of seeds or
attributes is allowed, with the latter satisfying an easy to verify spectral
characteristic
A path following algorithm for the graph matching problem
We propose a convex-concave programming approach for the labeled weighted
graph matching problem. The convex-concave programming formulation is obtained
by rewriting the weighted graph matching problem as a least-square problem on
the set of permutation matrices and relaxing it to two different optimization
problems: a quadratic convex and a quadratic concave optimization problem on
the set of doubly stochastic matrices. The concave relaxation has the same
global minimum as the initial graph matching problem, but the search for its
global minimum is also a hard combinatorial problem. We therefore construct an
approximation of the concave problem solution by following a solution path of a
convex-concave problem obtained by linear interpolation of the convex and
concave formulations, starting from the convex relaxation. This method allows
to easily integrate the information on graph label similarities into the
optimization problem, and therefore to perform labeled weighted graph matching.
The algorithm is compared with some of the best performing graph matching
methods on four datasets: simulated graphs, QAPLib, retina vessel images and
handwritten chinese characters. In all cases, the results are competitive with
the state-of-the-art.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures,typo correction, new results in sections 4,5,
A Family of Tractable Graph Distances
Important data mining problems such as nearest-neighbor search and clustering
admit theoretical guarantees when restricted to objects embedded in a metric
space. Graphs are ubiquitous, and clustering and classification over graphs
arise in diverse areas, including, e.g., image processing and social networks.
Unfortunately, popular distance scores used in these applications, that scale
over large graphs, are not metrics and thus come with no guarantees. Classic
graph distances such as, e.g., the chemical and the CKS distance are arguably
natural and intuitive, and are indeed also metrics, but they are intractable:
as such, their computation does not scale to large graphs. We define a broad
family of graph distances, that includes both the chemical and the CKS
distance, and prove that these are all metrics. Crucially, we show that our
family includes metrics that are tractable. Moreover, we extend these distances
by incorporating auxiliary node attributes, which is important in practice,
while maintaining both the metric property and tractability.Comment: Extended version of paper appearing in SDM 201