Top-k Graph Similarity Search Based on Hierarchical Inverted Index

Graph similarity search is an important research problem in many applications, such as finding result graphs that have a similar structure to a given entity in biochemistry, data mining, and pattern recognition. Top-k graph similarity search is one of graph similarity search tasks, which aims to find the top-k graphs that are most similar to the query graph in a given graph database. In this paper, the top-k similarity search problem based on the graph edit distance is studied according to the corollary of the partitioned similarity theorem. Firstly, in order to speed up the online search process and avoid scanning each graph in the database one by one, an offline hierarchical inverted index is constructed to satisfy top-k search. Secondly, the offline hierarchical inverted index is used to filter the candidate graphs online and verify them, which reduces the time of searching the graphs. Finally, the good performance of the algorithm in running time and scalability is verified by running the similarity algorithm on real dataset and synthetic dataset.