Graph Edit Distance Computation via Graph Neural Networks
Graph similarity search is among the most important graph-based applications, e.g. finding the chemical compounds that are most similar to a query compound. Graph similarity/distance computation, such as Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Maximum Common Subgraph (MCS), is the core operation of graph similarity search and many other applications, which is usually very costly to compute. Inspired by the recent success of neural network approaches to several graph applications, such as node classification and graph classification, we propose a novel neural network-based approach to address this challenging while classical graph problem, with the hope to alleviate the computational burden while preserving a good performance. Our model generalizes to unseen graphs, and in the worst case runs in linear time with respect to the number of nodes in two graphs. Taking GED computation as an example, experimental results on three real graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Specifically, our model achieves smaller error and great time reduction compared against several approximate algorithms on GED computation. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to adopt neural networks to model the similarity between two graphs, and provide a new direction for future research on graph similarity computation and graph similarity search.
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