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Into the data mining field, frequent approximate subgraph (FAS) mining has become an important technique with a broad spectrum of real-life applications. This fact is because several real-life phenomena can be modeled by graphs. In the literature, several algorithms have been reported for mining frequent approximate patterns on simple-graph collections; however, there are applications where more complex data structures, as multi-graphs, are needed for modeling the problem. But to the best of our knowledge, there is no FAS mining algorithm designed for dealing with multi-graphs. Therefore, in this paper, a canonical form (CF) for simple-graphs is extended to allow representing multi-graphs and a state-of-the-art algorithm for FAS mining is also extended for processing multi-graph collections by using the extended CF. Our experiments over different synthetic and real-world multi-graph collections show that the proposed algorithm has a good performance in terms of runtime and scalability. Additionally, we show the usefulness of the patterns computed by our algorithm in an image classification problem where images are represented as multi-graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]