Output Space Sampling for Graph Patterns

Recent interest in graph pattern mining has shifted from finding all frequent subgraphs to obtaining a small subset of frequent subgraphs that are representative, discriminative or significant. The main motivation behind that is to cope with the scalability problem that the graph mining algorithms suffer when mining databases of large graphs. Another motivation is to obtain a succinct output set that is informative and useful. In the same spirit, researchers also proposed sampling based algorithms that sample the output space of the frequent patterns to obtain representative subgraphs. In this work, we propose a generic sampling framework that is based on Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to sample the output space of frequent subgraphs. Our experiments on various sampling strategies show the versatility, utility and efficiency of the proposed sampling approach.