Neural Subgraph Matching

Subgraph matching is the problem of determining the presence of a given query graph in a large target graph. Despite being an NPcomplete problem, the subgraph matching problem is crucial in domains ranging from network science and database systems to biochemistry and cognitive science. However, existing techniques based on combinatorial matching and integer programming cannot handle matching problems with both large target and query graphs. Here we propose NeuroMatch, an accurate, efficient, and robust neural approach to subgraph matching. Trained to capture geometric constraints corresponding to subgraph relations, NeuroMatch then efficiently performs subgraph matching directly in the embedding space. Experiments demonstrate that NeuroMatch is 100x faster than existing combinatorial approaches and 18% more accurate than existing approximate subgraph matching methods. Given a query graph, the problem of subgraph isomorphism matching is to determine if a query graph is isomorphic to a subgraph of a large target graph. If the graphs include node and edge features, both the topology as well as the features should be matched. Subgraph matching is a crucial problem in many biology, social network and knowledge graph applications (Gentner, 1983; Raymond et al., 2002; Yang & Sze, 2007; Dai et al., 2019). For example, in social networks and biomedical network science, researchers investigate important subgraphs by counting them in a given network (Alon et al., 2008). In knowledge graphs, common substructures are extracted by querying them in the larger target graph (Gentner, 1983; Plotnick, 1997).