A Chronological Edge-Driven Approach to Temporal Subgraph Isomorphism

A useful technique for adversary activity graph analytics is to perform subgraph isomorphism; searching for a specific graph pattern within a larger graph. Many of the networks that may be useful for adversary activity analysis are temporal networks, in which the chronological ordering of the edges has importance to the meaning of the data. Performing temporal subgraph matching requires the edges in the subgraphs to match the order of the temporal graph motif we are searching for. Previous methods for solving this rely on the use of static subgraph matching to find potential matches first, before filtering them based on edge order to find the true temporal matches. We present a new algorithm for temporal subgraph isomorphism that performs the subgraph matching directly on the chronologically sorted edges. By restricting our search to only the subgraphs with chronologically correct edges, we can improve the performance of the algorithm significantly in many cases. We present experimental timing results to show significant performance improvements on publicly available datasets for a number of different temporal query graph motifs with four or more nodes. We also demonstrate a practical example of how temporal subgraph isomorphism can produce more meaningful results than traditional static subgraph searches.