Fast and High Quality Graph Alignment via Treelets

Morgan Lee, George M. Slota

Abstract: This work is a preliminary validation on using treelets in lieu of graphlets for the alignment of biological interaction networks. There has been considerable prior work on calculating alignments from vertex-based topological similarity measures based on local subgraph (i.e., graphlet) counts. In this work, we instead consider treelets, which are small acyclic subgraphs. As tree subgraphs can be enumerated quite quickly in parallel, we are able to consider larger subgraphs to better capture topological similarities in graph regions. We demonstrate that relative to the prior work using graphlets, our approach is more scalable and outputs similar or higher quality alignments.