Scalable graph isomorphism: Combining pairwise color refinement and backtracking via compressed candidate space

Graph isomorphism is a core problem in graph analysis of various application domains. Given two graphs, the graph isomorphism problem is to determine whether there exists an isomorphism between them. As real-world graphs are getting bigger and bigger, applications demand practically fast algorithms that can run on large-scale graphs. However, existing approaches such as graph canonization and subgraph isomorphism show limited performances on large-scale graphs either in time or space. In this paper, we propose a new approach to graph isomorphism, which is the framework of pairwise color refinement and efficient backtracking. The main features of our approach are: (1) pairwise color refinement and binary cell mapping (2) compressed CS (candidate space), and (3) partial failing set, which together lead to a much faster and scalable algorithm for graph isomorphism. Extensive experiments with real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by up to orders of magnitude in terms of running time.