Challenging the time complexity of exact subgraph isomorphism for huge and dense graphs with VF3

Graph matching is essential in several fields that use structured information, such as biology, chemistry, social networks, knowledge management, document analysis and others. Except for special classes of graphs, graph matching has in the worst-case an exponential complexity; however, there are algorithms that show an acceptable execution time, as long as the graphs are not too large and not too dense. In this paper we introduce a novel subgraph isomorphism algorithm, VF3, particularly efficient in the challenging case of graphs with thousands of nodes and a high edge density. Its performance, both in terms of time and memory, has been assessed on a large dataset of 12700 random graphs with a size up to 10000 nodes, made publicly available. VF3 has been compared with four other state-of-the-art algorithms, and the huge experimentation required more than two years of processing time. The results confirm that VF3 definitely outperforms the other algorithms when the graphs become huge and dense, but also has a very good performance on smaller or sparser graphs.