Pivoted subgraph isomorphism: The optimist, the pessimist and the realist

Given query graph Q with pivot node v, Pivoted Subgraph Isomorphism (PSI) finds all distinct nodes in an input graph G that correspond to v in all matches of Q in G. PSI is a core operation in many applications such as frequent subgraph mining, protein functionality prediction and in-network node similarity. Existing applications implement PSI as an instance of the general subgraph isomorphism algorithm, which is expensive and under-optimized. As a result, these applications perform poorly and do not scale to large graphs. In this paper, we propose SmartPSI; a system to efficiently evaluate PSI queries. We develop two algorithms, called optimistic and pessimistic, each tailored for different instances of the problem. Based on machine learning, SmartPSI builds on-the-fly a classifier to decide which of the two algorithms is appropriate for evaluating each graph node. SmartPSI also implements a machine learning-based optimizer to generate low-cost execution plans. Our experimental evaluation with large-scale real graphs shows that SmartPSI outperforms existing approaches by up to two orders of magnitude and is able to process significantly larger graphs. Moreover, SmartPSI is shown to achieve up to 6 times performance improvement when it replaces standard subgraph isomorphism in the state-of-the-art distributed frequent subgraph mining system.