Graph mining is gaining importance due to the numerous applications that rely on graph-based data. Some example applications
are: (i) analysis of microarray data in bioinformatics, (ii) pattern discovery in social networks, (iii) analysis of transportation
networks, (iv) community discovery in Web data. Existing pattern discovery approaches operate by using simple constraints
on the mined patterns. For example, given a database of graphs, a typical graph mining task is to report all subgraphs that
appear in at least s graphs, where s is the frequency support threshold. In other cases, we are interested in the discovery
of dense or highly-connected subgraphs. In such a case, a threshold is defined for the density or the connectivity of the
returned patterns. Other constraints may be defined as well, towards restricting the number of mined patterns. There are three
important limitations with this approach: (i) there is an on-off decision regarding the eligibility of patterns, i.e., a pattern
either satisfies the constraints or not, (ii) in the case where the constraints are very strict we risk an empty answer or
an answer with only a few patterns, and (iii) in the case where the constraints are too weak the number of patterns may be
huge.
This is an extended abstract of an article published in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal [1].