fast-gspan 0.1.1

Fast gSpan (frequent subgraph mining) powered by gBolt C++ backend

fast-gspan

A Python wrapper for frequent subgraph mining powered by the gBolt C++ backend.

Provides a simple API to mine frequent subgraph patterns from NetworkX graphs, with significant speedups over pure-Python gSpan implementations.

Installation

Pre-built wheels are available for Linux (x86_64) and macOS (arm64, x86_64):

pip install fast-gspan

Building from source

If a pre-built wheel is not available for your platform, install from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/Masatsugar/fast-gspan.git
python -m fast_gspan build   # compile the C++ backend

Source builds require:

• CMake >= 3.10
• C++ compiler with C++11 support (GCC, Clang)
• OpenMP (optional, for parallel mining)

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install cmake g++ make

# macOS
brew install cmake libomp

Quick start

import networkx as nx
from fast_gspan import FastgSpan

# Prepare your graph database
graphs = [...]  # list of NetworkX graphs with 'label' attributes on nodes/edges

# Mine frequent subgraphs
fgs = FastgSpan(min_support=10, max_num_vertices=8)
df = fgs.run_from_graphs(graphs)

print(df[["support", "num_vert", "description"]])

From a gSpan-format file

from fast_gspan import FastgSpan

df = FastgSpan(min_support=10, max_num_vertices=8).run_from_file("graphs.txt")

Parallel mining & progress

fgs = FastgSpan(
    min_support=10,
    max_num_vertices=8,
    num_threads=4,       # 0 = all cores (default)
    show_progress=True,  # show real-time pattern count
)
df = fgs.run_from_graphs(graphs)

API

FastgSpan

High-level interface. Constructor parameters:

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
gbolt_path	str | None	None	Path to gBolt executable. Auto-detected if None.
min_support	int	2	Minimum absolute support threshold.
min_num_vertices	int	1	Minimum vertices in a pattern.
max_num_vertices	int	10	Maximum vertices in a pattern.
num_threads	int	0	Number of OpenMP threads (0 = all cores).
show_progress	bool	False	Show progress during mining.
verbose	bool	False	Print debug information.

Methods:

• run_from_graphs(graphs) -- Mine from a list of nx.Graph. Returns pd.DataFrame.
• run_from_file(filepath) -- Read a gSpan-format file and mine. Returns pd.DataFrame.

GBoltWrapper

Low-level wrapper around the gBolt binary. Use this if you need direct access to raw pattern dicts.

• mine_frequent_subgraphs(graphs) -- Returns list[dict] with keys: pattern_id, support, vertices, edges, dfs_codes, graph_data.

Output format

The returned DataFrame has the following columns:

Column	Description
support	Number of graphs containing this pattern
description	DFS-code representation: (from, to, from_label, edge_label, to_label) per edge
num_vert	Number of vertices in the pattern
pattern_id	Pattern ID assigned by gBolt
vertices	List of (vertex_id, label) tuples
edges	List of (from, to, edge_label) tuples

gSpan-format file

Input files follow the standard gSpan text format:

t # 0
v 0 1
v 1 2
e 0 1 3
t # 1
v 0 1
v 1 1
v 2 2
e 0 1 3
e 1 2 4
t # -1

Changes from upstream gBolt

This package bundles a modified fork of gBolt with the following changes:

New features

• -x, --max-vertices option -- Limits the maximum number of vertices in mined patterns. Allows early pruning during DFS exploration, reducing both runtime and memory usage.
• Projection size guard (MAX_PROJECTION_SIZE) -- Skips projections exceeding 500,000 entries to prevent memory explosion on dense graphs.

Output format change

• The DFS-code output (-d flag) now emits the full tuple:

  e <from> <to> <from_label> <edge_label> <to_label>
  

  The upstream format only emitted e <from> <to> <edge_label>. The extended format enables exact reconstruction of canonical DFS codes in the Python wrapper.

Build system

• CMake minimum version raised from 2.6 to 3.10.
• Added macOS (Apple Clang) fallback for OpenMP via Homebrew libomp.

Bug fixes

• Added const qualifier to three operator() methods in include/graph.h to fix compiler warnings and ensure correctness with modern C++ standards.

License

The bundled gBolt C++ source is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License (Copyright (c) 2017, Keren Zhou). See fast_gspan/vendor/gbolt/LICENSE for details.

The Python wrapper code in this repository is also released under the BSD 2-Clause License.