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A survey of graph edit distance

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Abstract

Inexact graph matching has been one of the significant research foci in the area of pattern analysis. As an important way to measure the similarity between pairwise graphs error-tolerantly, graph edit distance (GED) is the base of inexact graph matching. The research advance of GED is surveyed in order to provide a review of the existing literatures and offer some insights into the studies of GED. Since graphs may be attributed or non-attributed and the definition of costs for edit operations is various, the existing GED algorithms are categorized according to these two factors and described in detail. After these algorithms are analyzed and their limitations are identified, several promising directions for further research are proposed.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank the helpful comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers. This research has been partially supported by National Science Foundation of China (60771068, 60702061, 60832005), the Open-End Fund of National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition in China and National Laboratory of Automatic Target Recognition, Shenzhen University, China, the Program for Changjiang Scholars and innovative Research Team in University of China (IRT0645).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, 710071, Xi’an, People’s Republic of China

    Xinbo Gao & Bing Xiao

  2. School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Blk N4, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Dacheng Tao

  3. School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, WC1E 7HX, UK

    Xuelong Li

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  1. Xinbo Gao
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  2. Bing Xiao
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  3. Dacheng Tao
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  4. Xuelong Li
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Correspondence to Xuelong Li.

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Gao, X., Xiao, B., Tao, D. et al. A survey of graph edit distance. Pattern Anal Applic 13, 113–129 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-008-0141-y

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