Graph Iso/Auto-morphism: A Divide-&-Conquer Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces DviCL, a divide-and-conquer algorithm for graph canonical labeling that efficiently handles large graphs by constructing an AutoTree to preserve automorphism structures.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel divide-and-conquer approach using AutoTree for canonical labeling, improving efficiency and robustness over existing algorithms for large graphs.

Findings

DviCL outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on large graphs.

AutoTree effectively preserves automorphism groups.

DviCL demonstrates high efficiency and robustness in extensive tests.

Abstract

The graph isomorphism is to determine whether two graphs are isomorphic. A closely related problem is automorphism detection, where an isomorphism between two graphs is a bijection between their vertex sets that preserves adjacency, and an automorphism is an isomorphism from a graph to itself. Applications of graph isomorphism/automorphism include database indexing, network simplification, network anonymization. By graph automorphism, we deal with symmetric subgraph matching (SSM), which is to find all subgraphs that are symmetric to a given subgraph in G. An application of SSM is to identify multiple seed sets that have the same influence power as a seed set found by influence maximization in a social network. To test two graphs for isomorphism, canonical labeling has been studied to relabel a graph in such a way that isomorphic graphs are identical after relabeling. Efficient canonical labeling algorithms have been designed by individualization-refinement. They enumerate all permutations using a search tree, and select the minimum as the canonical labeling, which prunes candidates during enumeration. Despite high performance in benchmark graphs, these algorithms face difficulties in handling massive graphs. In this paper, we design a new efficient canonical labeling algorithm DviCL. Different from previous algorithms, we take a divide-&-conquer approach to partition G. By partitioning G, an AutoTree is constructed, which preserves symmetric structures and the automorphism group of G. The canonical labeling for a tree node can be obtained by the canonical labeling of its child nodes, and the canonical labeling for the root is the one for G. Such AutoTree can also be effectively used to answer the automorphism group, symmetric subgraphs. We conducted extensive performance studies using 22 large graphs, and confirmed that DviCL is much more efficient and robust than the state-of-the-art.