An Iterative Global Structure-Assisted Labeled Network Aligner

TL;DR

This paper introduces gsaNA, an iterative graph aligner that leverages global structure to efficiently align large graphs with high accuracy, outperforming existing methods in speed and recall.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel scalable iterative graph alignment method that uses global structure to improve accuracy and efficiency over prior approaches.

Findings

gsaNA is significantly faster than existing techniques.

It achieves higher recall in graph alignment tasks.

The method effectively handles large graphs with minimal information loss.

Abstract

Integrating data from heterogeneous sources is often modeled as merging graphs. Given two or more 'compatible', but not-isomorphic graphs, the first step is to identify a graph alignment, where a potentially partial mapping of vertices between two graphs is computed. A significant portion of the literature on this problem only takes the global structure of the input graphs into account. Only more recent ones additionally use vertex and edge attributes to achieve a more accurate alignment. However, these methods are not designed to scale to map large graphs arising in many modern applications. We propose a new iterative graph aligner, gsaNA, that uses the global structure of the graphs to significantly reduce the problem size and align large graphs with a minimal loss of information. Concretely, we show that our proposed technique is highly flexible, can be used to achieve higher recall, and it is orders of magnitudes faster than the current state of the art techniques.