Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
  • Publication
    A Fast Heuristic for Computing Geodesic Closures in Large Networks
    ( 2022-11-06)
    Seiffarth, Florian
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    Motivated by the increasing interest in applications of graph geodesic convexity in machine learning and data mining, we present a heuristic for approximating the geodesic convex hull of node sets in large networks. It generates a small set of (almost) maximal outerplanar spanning subgraphs for the input graph, computes the geodesic closure in each of these graphs, and regards a node as an element of the convex hull if it belongs to the closed sets for at least a user specified number of outerplanar graphs. Our heuristic algorithm runs in time linear in the number of edges of the input graph, i.e., it is faster with one order of magnitude than the standard algorithm computing the closure exactly. Its performance is evaluated empirically by approximating convexity based core-periphery decomposition of networks. Our experimental results with large real-world networks show that for most networks, the proposed heuristic was able to produce close approximations significantly faster than the standard algorithm computing the exact convex hulls. For example, while our algorithm calculated an approximate core-periphery decomposition in 5 h or less for networks with more than 20 million edges, the standard algorithm did not terminate within 50 days.
  • Publication
    A Simple Heuristic for the Graph Tukey Depth Problem with Potential Applications to Graph Mining
    ( 2022)
    Seiffarth, Florian
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    We study a recently introduced adaptation of Tukey depth to graphs and discuss its algorithmic properties and potential applications to mining and learning with graphs. In particular, since it is NP-hard to compute the Tukey depth of a node, as a first contribution we provide a simple heuristic based on maximal closed set separation in graphs and show empirically on different graph datasets that its approximation error is small. Our second contribution is concerned with geodesic core-periphery decompositions of graphs. We show empirically that the geodesic core of a graph consists of those nodes that have a high Tukey depth. This information allows for a parameterized deterministic definition of the geodesic core of a graph.
  • Publication
    Learning Weakly Convex Sets in Metric Spaces
    ( 2021-09-10)
    Stadtländer, Eike
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    We introduce the notion of weak convexity in metric spaces, a generalization of ordinary convexity commonly used in machine learning. It is shown that weakly convex sets can be characterized by a closure operator and have a unique decomposition into a set of pairwise disjoint connected blocks. We give two generic efficient algorithms, an extensional and an intensional one for learning weakly convex concepts and study their formal properties. Our experimental results concerning vertex classification clearly demonstrate the excellent predictive performance of the extensional algorithm. Two non-trivial applications of the intensional algorithm to polynomial PAC-learnability are presented. The first one deals with learning k-convex Boolean functions, which are already known to be efficiently PAC-learnable. It is shown how to derive this positive result in a fairly easy way by the generic intensional algorithm. The second one is concerned with the Euclidean space equipped with the Manhattan distance. For this metric space, weakly convex sets form a union of pairwise disjoint axis-aligned hyperrectangles. We show that a weakly convex set that is consistent with a set of examples and contains a minimum number of hyperrectangles can be found in polynomial time. In contrast, this problem is known to be NP-complete if the hyperrectangles may be overlapping.
  • Publication
    Maximum Margin Separations in Finite Closure Systems
    ( 2021)
    Seiffahrt, Florian
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    Monotone linkage functions provide a measure for proximities between elements and subsets of a ground set. Combining this notion with Vapniks idea of support vector machines, we extend the concepts of maximal closed set and half-space separation in finite closure systems to those with maximum margin. In particular, we define the notion of margin for finite closure systems by means of monotone linkage functions and give a greedy algorithm computing a maximum margin closed set separation for two sets efficiently. The output closed sets are maximum margin half-spaces, i.e., form a partitioning of the ground set if the closure system is Kakutani. We have empirically evaluated our approach on different synthetic datasets. In addition to binary classification of finite subsets of the Euclidean space, we considered also the problem of vertex classification in graphs. Our experimental results provide clear evidence that maximal closed set separation with maximum margin results in a much better predictive performance than that with arbitrary maximal closed sets.
  • Publication
    Maximal Closed Set and Half-Space Separations in Finite Closure Systems
    ( 2020)
    Seiffarth, Florian
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    Motivated by various binary classification problems in structured data (e.g., graphs or other relational and algebraic structures), we investigate some algorithmic properties of closed set and half-space separation in abstract closure systems. Assuming that the underlying closure system is finite and given by the corresponding closure operator, we formulate some negative and positive complexity results for these two separation problems. In particular, we prove that deciding half-space separability in abstract closure systems is NP-complete in general. On the other hand, for the relaxed problem of maximal closed set separation we propose a simple greedy algorithm and show that it is efficient and has the best possible lower bound on the number of closure operator calls. As a second direction to overcome the negative result above, we consider Kakutani closure systems and show first that our greedy algorithm provides an algorithmic characterization of this kind of set systems. As one of the major potential application fields, we then focus on Kakutani closure systems over graphs and generalize a fundamental characterization result based on the Pasch axiom to graph structure partitioning of finite sets. Though the primary focus of this work is on the generality of the results obtained, we experimentally demonstrate the practical usefulness of our approach on vertex classification in different graph datasets.
  • Publication
    Mining Tree Patterns with Partially Injective Homomorphisms
    ( 2019)
    Schulz, Till Hendrik
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    Welke, Pascal
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    One of the main differences between inductive logic programming (ILP) and graph mining lies in the pattern matching operator applied: While it is mainly defined by relational homomorphism (i.e., subsumption) in ILP, subgraph isomorphism is the most common pattern matching operator in graph mining. Using the fact that subgraph isomorphisms are injective homomorphisms, we bridge the gap between ILP and graph mining by considering a natural transition from homomorphisms to subgraph isomorphisms that is defined by partially injective homomorphisms, i.e., which require injectivity only for subsets of the vertex pairs in the pattern. Utilizing positive complexity results on deciding homomorphisms from bounded tree-width graphs, we present an algorithm mining frequent trees from arbitrary graphs w.r.t. partially injective homomorphisms. Our experimental results show that the predictive performance of the patterns obtained is comparable to that of ordinary frequent subgraphs. Thus, by preserving much from the advantageous properties of homomorphisms and subgraph isomorphisms, our approach provides a trade-off between efficiency and predictive power.
  • Publication
    Support Estimation in Frequent Itemset Mining by Locality Sensitive Hashing
    The main computational effort in generating all frequent itemsets in a transactional database is in the step of deciding whether an itemset is frequent, or not. We present a method for estimating itemset supports with two-sided error. In a preprocessing step our algorithm first partitions the database into groups of similar transactions by using locality sensitive hashing and calculates a summary for each of these groups. The support of a query itemset is then estimated by means of these summaries. Our preliminary empirical results indicate that the proposed method results in a speed-up of up to a factor of 50 on large datasets. The F-measure of the output patterns varies between 0.83 and 0.99.
  • Publication
    Probabilistic frequent subtree kernels
    ( 2016)
    Welke, Pascal
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    We propose a new probabilistic graph kernel. It is defined by the set of frequent subtrees generated from a small random sample of spanning trees of the transaction graphs. In contrast to the ordinary frequent subgraph kernel it can be computed efficiently for any arbitrary graphs. Due to its probabilistic nature, the embedding function corresponding to our graph kernel is not always correct. Our empirical results on artificial and real-world chemical datasets, however, demonstrate that the graph kernel we propose is much faster than other frequent pattern based graph kernels, with only marginal loss in predictive accuracy.
  • Publication
    Min-hashing for probabilistic frequent subtree feature spaces
    ( 2016)
    Welke, Pascal
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    We propose a fast algorithm for approximating graph similarities. For its advantageous semantic and algorithmic properties, we define the similarity between two graphs by the Jaccard-similarity of their images in a binary feature space spanned by the set of frequent subtrees generated for some training dataset. Since the feature space embedding is computationally intractable, we use a probabilistic subtree isomorphism operator based on a small sample of random spanning trees and approximate the Jaccard-similarity by min-hash sketches. The partial order on the feature set defined by subgraph isomorphism allows for a fast calculation of the min-hash sketch, without explicitly performing the feature space embedding. Experimental results on real-world graph datasets show that our technique results in a fast algorithm. Furthermore, the approximated similarities are well-suited for classification and retrieval tasks in large graph datasets.
  • Publication
    On the complexity of frequent subtree mining in very simple structures
    ( 2015)
    Welke, Pascal
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    We study the complexity of frequent subtree mining in very simple graphs beyond forests. We show for d-tenuous outerplanar graphs that frequent subtrees can be listed with polynomial delay if the cycle degree, i.e., the maximum number of blocks that share a common vertex, is bounded by some constant. The crucial step in the proof of this positive result is a polynomial time algorithm deciding subgraph isomorphism from trees into d-tenuous outerplanar graphs of bounded cycle degree. We obtain this algorithm by generalizing the algorithm of Shamir and Tsur that decides subgraph isomorphism between trees. Our results may also be of some interest to algorithmic graph theory, as they indicate that even for very simple structures, the cycle degree is a crucial parameter for the tractability of subgraph isomorphism. We also discuss some interesting problems towards generalizing the positive result of this work.