Subgraph matching on temporal graphs

Temporal graphs are graphs whose edges are associated with timestamps. Subgraph matching on temporal graphs retrieves temporal subgraphs whose edge timestamps satisfy user-specified temporal orders. In this paper, a temporal query pattern is composed of a query graph with an arbitrary structure and a partial order on the edge set of the query graph. Moreover, the time span between the minimum and the maximum edge times tamps in a matching is required to be less than or equal to a specified threshold. This paper proposes a temporal subgraph matching algorithm based on two key techniques. First, a memory-efficient index structure called TO-tree is designed to compactly store all necessary information required for finding all temporal subgraph matchings. The TO-tree constructed for a temporal query pattern is much smaller than the temporal graph because unnecessary information is mostly excluded from the TO-tree by three powerful filters. The second technique is a temporal subgraph matching enumeration method that runs on the TO-tree instead of on the temporal graph. This enumeration method expands temporal subgraph matchings in an edge-by-edge manner. Since the TO-tree can fit into the main memory, the enumeration method runs very fast on the TO-tree. An extensive experimental evaluation has been carried out. The experimental results show that the TO-tree index structure is memory-efficient, which in turn enables a fast temporal subgraph matching enumeration. Overall, our algorithm is at least 3X faster than the baseline algorithm adapted from the state-of-the-art non-temporal subgraph matching algorithm CECI and is at least 4X faster than the temporal subgraph matching algorithm HASSE. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.