Comparison among graphs is ubiquitous in graph analytics. However, it is a
hard task in terms of the expressiveness of the employed similarity measure and
the efficiency of its computation. Ideally, graph comparison should be
invariant to the order of nodes and the sizes of compared graphs, adaptive to
the scale of graph patterns, and scalable. Unfortunately, these properties have
not been addressed together. Graph comparisons still rely on direct approaches,
graph kernels, or representation-based methods, which are all inefficient and
impractical for large graph collections.
In this paper, we propose the Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor (NetLSD):
the first, to our knowledge, permutation- and size-invariant, scale-adaptive,
and efficiently computable graph representation method that allows for
straightforward comparisons of large graphs. NetLSD extracts a compact
signature that inherits the formal properties of the Laplacian spectrum,
specifically its heat or wave kernel; thus, it hears the shape of a graph. Our
evaluation on a variety of real-world graphs demonstrates that it outperforms
previous works in both expressiveness and efficiency.

本文提出了 Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor（NetLSD）方法，可以实现对大型图的快速比较，该方法是目前为止唯一一种既具有置换和尺寸等变性，同时又可扩展和高效计算的图形表示方法，并且具有比以往方法更好的表达性和效率。