Optimal Enumeration: Efficient Top-k Tree Matching

Driven by many real applications, graph pattern matching has attracted a great deal of attention recently. Consider that a twig-pattern matching may result in an extremely large number of matches in a graph; this may not only confuse users by providing too many results but also lead to high computational costs. In this paper, we study the problem of top-k tree pattern matching; that is, given a rooted tree T, compute its top-k matches in a directed graph G based on the twig-pattern matching semantics. We firstly present a novel and optimal enumeration paradigm based on the principle of Lawler's procedure. We show that our enumeration algorithm runs in O(nT + log k) time in each round where nT is the number of nodes in T. Considering that the time complexity to output a match of T is O(nT) and nT ≥ log k in practice, our enumeration technique is optimal. Moreover, the cost of generating top-1 match of T in our algorithm is O(mR) where mR is the number of edges in the transitive closure of a data graph G involving all relevant nodes to T. O(mR) is also optimal in the worst case without pre-knowledge of G. Consequently, our algorithm is optimal with the running time O(mR + k(nT + log k)) in contrast to the time complexity O(mR log k + knT(log k + dT)) of the existing technique where dT is the maximal node degree in T. Secondly, a novel priority based access technique is proposed, which greatly reduces the number of edges accessed and results in a significant performance improvement. Finally, we apply our techniques to the general form of top-k graph pattern matching problem (i.e., query is a graph) to improve the existing techniques. Comprehensive empirical studies demonstrate that our techniques may improve the existing techniques by orders of magnitude.