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

Dynamic Complexity of Planar 3-connected Graph Isomorphism

Dynamic Complexity (as introduced by Patnaik and Immerman) tries to express how hard it is to update the solution to a problem when the input is changed slightly. It considers the changes required to some stored data structure (possibly a massive database) as small quantities of data (or a tuple) are inserted or deleted from the database (or a structure over some vocabulary). The main difference from previous notions of dynamic complexity is that instead of treating the update quantitatively by finding the the time/space trade-offs, it tries to consider the update qualitatively, by finding the complexity class in which the update can be expressed (or made). In this setting, DynFO, or Dynamic First-Order, is one of the smallest and the most natural complexity class (since SQL queries can be expressed in First-Order Logic), and contains those problems whose solutions (or the stored data structure from which the solution can be found) can be updated in First-Order Logic when the data structure undergoes small changes. Etessami considered the problem of isomorphism in the dynamic setting, and showed that Tree Isomorphism can be decided in DynFO. In this work, we show that isomorphism of Planar 3-connected graphs can be decided in DynFO+ (which is DynFO with some polynomial precomputation). We maintain a canonical description of 3-connected Planar graphs by maintaining a database which is accessed and modified by First-Order queries when edges are added to or deleted from the graph. We specifically exploit the ideas of Breadth-First Search and Canonical Breadth-First Search to prove the results. We also introduce a novel method for canonizing a 3-connected planar graph in First-Order Logic from Canonical Breadth-First Search Trees