A Comparison of Three Maximum Common Subgraph Algorithms on a Large Database of Labeled Graphs

A graph g is called a maximum common subgraph of two graphs, g 1 and g 2 , if there exists no other common subgraph of g 1 and g2 that has more nodes than g. For the maximum common subgraph problem, exact and inexact algorithms are known from the literature. Nevertheless, until now no effort has been done for characterizing their performance, mainly for the lack of a large database of graphs. In this paper, three exact and well-known algorithms for maximum common subgraph detection are described. Moreover, a large database containing various categories of pairs of graphs (e.g. randomly connected graphs, meshes, bounded valence graphs...), having a maximum common subgraph of at least two nodes, is presented, and the performance of the three algorithms is evaluated on this database.