StruClus: Structural Clustering of Large-Scale Graph Databases

TL;DR

StruClus is a scalable, interpretable clustering algorithm for large graph datasets that uses frequent subgraph sampling and representative sets, outperforming existing methods in quality and speed.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel structural clustering method for large-scale graph databases that is efficient, interpretable, and easily parallelizable, addressing previous scalability and interpretability issues.

Findings

Achieves linear runtime growth with dataset size.

Provides high-quality, interpretable clusters.

Outperforms existing clustering algorithms in speed and quality.

Abstract

We present a structural clustering algorithm for large-scale datasets of small labeled graphs, utilizing a frequent subgraph sampling strategy. A set of representatives provides an intuitive description of each cluster, supports the clustering process, and helps to interpret the clustering results. The projection-based nature of the clustering approach allows us to bypass dimensionality and feature extraction problems that arise in the context of graph datasets reduced to pairwise distances or feature vectors. While achieving high quality and (human) interpretable clusterings, the runtime of the algorithm only grows linearly with the number of graphs. Furthermore, the approach is easy to parallelize and therefore suitable for very large datasets. Our extensive experimental evaluation on synthetic and real world datasets demonstrates the superiority of our approach over existing structural and subspace clustering algorithms, both, from a runtime and quality point of view.