Discovering the underlying structures present in large real world graphs is a
fundamental scientific problem. In this paper we show that a graph's clique
tree can be used to extract a hyperedge replacement grammar. If we store an
ordering from the extraction process, the extracted graph grammar is guaranteed
to generate an isomorphic copy of the original graph. Or, a stochastic
application of the graph grammar rules can be used to quickly create random
graphs. In experiments on large real world networks, we show that random
graphs, generated from extracted graph grammars, exhibit a wide range of
properties that are very similar to the original graphs. In addition to graph
properties like degree or eigenvector centrality, what a graph "looks like"
ultimately depends on small details in local graph substructures that are
difficult to define at a global level. We show that our generative graph model
is able to preserve these local substructures when generating new graphs and
performs well on new and difficult tests of model robustness.Comment: 18 pages, 19 figures, accepted to CIKM 2016 in Indianapolis, I