Matching Sequences of Graphs

Abstract

In the current chapter we are going to address a new problem in the domain of graph matching. All algorithms for graph distance computation discussed previously in this book consider just a pair of graphs g and G, and derive their distance d(g, G). Our proposed extension consists in computing the distance d(s, S) of a pair of graph sequences s = g₁, ..., g_n and S = G₁, ..., Gm. Both sequences can be of arbitrary length. In particular, the length of s can be different from the length of S. The normal graph distance is obtained as a special case of the proposed graph sequence distance if each s and S consists of only one graph. Similarly to any of the classical graph distance measures d(g, G), the proposed graph sequence distance d(s, S) will be equal to zero if s and S are the same, i.e., n = m and g _i = G_i for i = 1, ..., n. On the other hand, d(s, S) will be large for two highly dissimilar sequences.