Topological features and iterative node elimination for speeding up subgraph isomorphism detection

In this paper we tackle the problem of subgraph isomorphism detection on large graphs, which may commonly be intractable, even with state of the art algorithms. Rather than competing with other matching algorithms, we define enhancements that can be used by (almost) any subgraph isomorphism algorithm, both current and future. These enhancements consist of a number of topological features to be added to the nodes, and a technique which we term “iterative node elimination”. The fusion of these enhancements is shown to be able to reduce subgraph isomorphism matching times by a factor of over 4,500.