Graph theory is becoming progressively important as it is applied to other fields of mathematics, science and technology. It is being actively used in areas as varied as biochemistry, electrical engineering, computer science and operations research. The main application of graph theory in data mining is graph mining. The need for mining structured data has increased in the past few years. Graphs are one of the best studied data structures in computer science and discrete mathematics. The relational aspect of data is explained by graph mining. The main aim of graph mining is to provide new principles and effective algorithms to mine topological substructures embedded in graph data. This article provides a brief review on four theoretical based approaches of graph based data mining. Brief description of application of graph mining is also provided. © 2016, International Journal of Pharmacy and Technology. All rights reserved.