TELKOMNIKA (Telecommunication Computing Electronics and Control)
Vol 24, No 4: August 2026

Methods of finding the maximum common transitive subgraph: experimental comparison

Oleg Sychev (Volgograd State Technical University)
Anton Chupinin (Volgograd State Technical University)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Aug 2026

Abstract

The problem of finding a maximum common subgraph (MCS) in a graph has broad applications in practical domains. However, certain scenarios require subgraphs with special properties, such as transitivity, that must be kept during building the subgraph. We formally define the concept of a transitive subgraph, investigate its properties. We study four different algorithms for finding the max imum common transitive subgraph (MCTS), compiled a list of tests aim at com paring graphs after making various changes and evaluated their accuracy and efficiency on a set of test cases. Benchmarking on 64 tests ranks the algorithms by scalability and accuracy: branch matching is the most scalable (> 1000 ver tices) and accurate (F1: 0.9907). MCS tree search is viable for graphs of up to ∼ 250 vertices (F1: 0.9752). Backtracking is limited to < 30 vertices (ac curacy: 0.5625), and brute-force is only feasible for graphs with ≤ 10 vertices, despite its high accuracy (0.9375). We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each method, the test cases where each method demonstrates a non-optimal MCTS,identify the classes on which the methods work correctly and found that the branch matching method based on the longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm performed the best.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

TELKOMNIKA

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Submitted papers are evaluated by anonymous referees by single blind peer review for contribution, originality, relevance, and presentation. The Editor shall inform you of the results of the review as soon as possible, hopefully in 10 weeks. Please notice that because of the great number of ...