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The large amount of data collected today is quickly overwhelming researchers' abilities to interpret the data and discover interesting patterns. Knowledge discovery and data mining approaches hold the potential to automate the interpretation process, but these approaches frequently utilize computationally expensive algorithms. In particular, scientific discovery systems focus on the utilization of richer data representation, sometimes without regard for scalability. This research investigates approaches for scaling a particular knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) system, SUBDUE, using parallel and distributed resources. SUBDUE has been used to discover interesting and repetitive concepts in graph‐based databases from a variety of domains, but requires a substantial amount of processing time. Experiments that demonstrate scalability of parallel versions of the SUBDUE system are performed using CAD circuit databases and artificially‐generated databases, and potential achievements and obstacles are discussed.

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The large amount of data collected today is quickly overwhelming researchers’ abilities to interpret the data and discover interesting patterns. In response to this problem, a number of researchers have developed techniques for discovering concepts in databases. These techniques work well for data expressed in a nonstructural, attribute-value representation and address issues of data relevance, missing data, noise and uncertainty, and utilization of domain knowledge (Fisher, 1987; Cheeseman and Stutz, 1996). However, recent data acquisition projects are collecting structural data describing the relationships among the data objects. Correspondingly, there exists a need for techniques to analyze and discover concepts in structural databases (Fayyad et al., 1996b). One method for discovering knowledge in structural data is the identification of common substructures. The goal is to find substructures capable of compressing the data and to identify conceptually interesting substructures that enhance the interpretation of the data. Substructure discovery is the process of identifying concepts describing interesting and repetitive substructures within structural data. Once discovered, the substructure concept can be used to simplify the data by replacing instances of the substructure with a pointer to the newly discovered concept. The discovered substructure concepts allow abstraction over detailed structure in the original data and provide new, relevant attributes for interpreting the data. Iteration of the substructure discovery and replacement process constructs a hierarchical description of the structural data in terms of the discovered substructures. This hierarchy provides varying levels of interpretation that can be accessed based on the goals of the data analysis. We describe a system called Subdue that discovers interesting substructures in structural data based on the minimum description length (MDL) principle. The Subdue system discovers substructures that compress the original data and represent structural concepts in the data. By replacing previously discovered substructures, multiple passes of Subdue produce a hierarchical description of the structural regularities in the data. Subdue uses a computationally bounded inexact graph match that identifies similar, but not identical, instances of a substructure and finds an approximate measure of closeness of two substructures when under computational constraints.