An improved global lower bound for graph edit similarity search

•New global lower bound on the edit distance between graphs.•An efficient preliminary filter for similarity search in graph databases.•Almost-for-free improvement on the previous global lower bounds.•The new bound is at least as tight as the previous global ones.•Experiments show the effectiveness of the new bound.

Graph similarity search is to retrieve data graphs that are similar to a given query graph. It has become an essential operation in many application areas. In this paper, we investigate the problem of graph similarity search with edit distance constraints. Existing solutions adopt the filter-and-verify strategy to speed up the search, where lower and upper bounds of graph edit distance are employed as pruning and validation rules in this process. The main problem with existing lower bounds is that they show different performance on different data graphs. An interesting group of lower bounds is the global counting ones. These bounds come almost for free and can be injected with any filtering methodology to work as preliminary filters. In this paper, we present an improvement upon these bounds without adding any computation overhead. We show that the new bound is tighter than the previous global ones except for few cases where they identically evaluate. Via experiments, we show how the new bound, when incorporated into previous lower bounding methods, increases the performance significantly.