Time-Constrained Continuous Subgraph Matching Using Temporal Information for Filtering and Backtracking

Real-time analysis of graphs containing temporal information, such as social media streams, Q&A networks, and cyber data sources, plays an important role in various applications. Among them, detecting patterns is one of the fundamental graph analysis problems. In this paper, we study time-constrained continuous subgraph matching, which detects a pattern with a strict partial order on the edge set in real-time whenever a temporal data graph changes over time. We propose a new algorithm based on two novel techniques. First, we introduce a filtering technique called time-constrained matchable edge that uses temporal information for filtering with polynomial space. Second, we develop time-constrained pruning techniques that reduce the search space by pruning some of the parallel edges in backtracking, utilizing temporal information. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by up to two orders of magnitude in terms of query processing time.