WSM: a novel algorithm for subgraph matching in large weighted graphs

Given an undirected/directed large weighted data graph and a similar smaller weighted pattern graph, the problem of weighted subgraph matching is to find a mapping of the nodes in the pattern graph to a subset of nodes in the data graph such that the sum of edge weight differences is minimum. Biological interaction networks such as protein-protein interaction networks and molecular pathways are often modeled as weighted graphs in order to account for the high false positive rate occurring intrinsically during the detection process of the interactions. Nonetheless, complex biological problems such as disease gene prioritization and conserved phylogenetic tree construction largely depend on the similarity calculation among the networks. Although several existing methods provide efficient methods for graph and subgraph similarity measurement, they produce nonintuitive results due to the underlying unweighted graph model assumption. Moreover, very few algorithms exist for weighted graph matching that are applicable with the restriction that the data and pattern graph sizes are equal. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for weighted subgraph matching which can effectively be applied to directed/undirected weighted subgraph matching. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and relative scalability of the algorithm over available state of the art methods.