HGMatch: A Match-by-Hyperedge Approach for Subgraph Matching on Hypergraphs

Hypergraphs are a generalisation of graphs in which a hyperedge can connect any number of vertices. It can describe n-ary relationships and high-order information among entities compared to conventional graphs. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem of subgraph matching on hypergraphs (i.e., subhypergraph matching). Existing methods directly extend sub-graph matching algorithms to the case of hypergraphs. However, this approach delays hyperedge verification and underutilises the high-order information in hypergraphs, which leads to large search space and high enumeration costs. Furthermore, with the growing size of hypergraphs, it is becoming hard to compute subhypergraph matching sequentially. Thus, we propose an efficient and parallel subhypergraph matching system, HGMatch, to handle subhypergraph matching in massive hypergraphs. We propose a novel match-by-hyperedge framework to utilise high-order information in hypergraphs and use set operations for efficient candidate generation. Moreover, we develop an optimised parallel execution engine in HGMatch based on the dataflow model, which features a task-based scheduler and fine-grained dynamic work stealing to achieve bounded memory execution and better load balancing. Experimental evaluation on 10 real-world datasets shows that HGMatch outperforms the extended version of the state-of-the-art subgraph matching algorithms (CFL, DAF, CECI, and RapidMatch) by orders of magnitude when using a single thread, and achieves almost linear scalability when the number of threads increases.