PSM-Flow: Probabilistic Subgraph Mining for Discovering Reusable Fragments in Workflows

Scientific workflows define computational processes needed for carrying out scientific experiments. Existing workflow repositories contain hundreds of scientific workflows, where scientists can find materials and knowledge to facilitate workflow design for running related experiments. Identifying reusable fragments in growing workflow repositories has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present PSM-Flow, a probabilistic subgraph mining algorithm designed to discover commonly occurring fragments in a workflow corpus using a modified version of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm. The proposed model encodes the geodesic distance between workflow steps into the model for implicitly modeling fragments. PSM-Flow captures variations of frequent fragments while maintaining its space complexity bounded polynomially, as it requires no candidate generation. We applied PSM-Flow to three real-world scientific workflow datasets containing more than 750 workflows for neuroimaging analysis. Our results show that PSM-Flow outperforms three state of the art frequent subgraph mining techniques. We also discuss other potential future improvements of the proposed method.