  Over the years, frequent subgraphs have been an important sort of targeted
patterns in the pattern mining literatures, where most works deal with
databases holding a number of graph transactions, e.g., chemical structures of
compounds. These methods rely heavily on the downward-closure property (DCP) of
the support measure to ensure an efficient pruning of the candidate patterns.
When switching to the emerging scenario of single-graph databases such as
Google Knowledge Graph and Facebook social graph, the traditional support
measure turns out to be trivial (either 0 or 1). However, to the best of our
knowledge, all attempts to redefine a single-graph support resulted in measures
that either lose DCP, or are no longer semantically intuitive.
  This paper targets mining patterns in the single-graph setting. We resolve
the "DCP-intuitiveness" dilemma by shifting the mining target from frequent
subgraphs to frequent neighborhoods. A neighborhood is a specific topological
pattern where a vertex is embedded, and the pattern is frequent if it is shared
by a large portion (above a given threshold) of vertices. We show that the new
patterns not only maintain DCP, but also have equally significant semantics as
subgraph patterns. Experiments on real-life datasets display the feasibility of
our algorithms on relatively large graphs, as well as the capability of mining
interesting knowledge that is not discovered in prior works.
