Fast Kernel for Calculating Structural Information Similarities

Structural similarity computation plays a crucial role in many applications such as in searching similar documents, in comparing chemical compounds, in finding genetic similarities, etc. We propose in this paper to use structural information content (SIC) for measuring structural information, considering both the nodes and edges of trees. We utilize a binary encoding approach for assigning the weights of different layer nodes and determining if some tree is a subtree of another tree. By defining a fast kernel and recursively computing SICs, we evaluate the structural information similarities of data trees to pattern trees. In the paper, we present the algorithm for calculating SICs with computation complexity of O(n), and use simple examples to instantiate the performance of the proposed method