One of the most fundamental problems in large scale network analysis is to determine the importance of a particular node in a network. Betweenness centrality is the most widely used metric to measure the importance of a node in a network. In this paper, we present a randomized parallel algorithm and an algebraic method for computing betweenness centrality of all nodes in a network. We prove that any path-comparison based algorithm cannot compute betweenness in less than O(nm) time.
In many applications we are required to increase the deployment of a distributed monitoring system on an evolving network. In this paper we present a new method for finding candidate locations for additional deployment in the network. This method is based on the Group Betweenness Centrality (GBC) measure that is used to estimate the influence of a group of nodes over the information flow in the network. The new method assists in finding the location of k additional monitors in the evolving network, such that the portion of additional traffic covered is at least (1-1/e) of the optimal.
In static graphs, the betweenness centrality of a graph vertex measures how many times this vertex is part of a shortest path between any two graph vertices. Betweenness centrality is efficiently computable and it is a fundamental tool in network science. Continuing and extending previous work, we study the efficient computability of betweenness centrality in temporal graphs (graphs with fixed vertex set but time-varying arc sets). Unlike in the static case, there are numerous natural notions of being a "shortest" temporal path (walk). Depending on which notion is used, it was already observed…
In network analysis, the betweenness centrality of a node informally captures the fraction of shortest paths visiting that node. The computation of the betweenness centrality measure is a fundamental task in the analysis of modern networks, enabling the identification of the most central nodes in such networks. Additionally to being massive, modern networks also contain information about the time at which their events occur. Such networks are often called temporal networks. The temporal information makes the study of the betweenness centrality in temporal networks (i.e., temporal betweenness c…
Betweenness centrality---measuring how many shortest paths pass through a vertex---is one of the most important network analysis concepts for assessing the relative importance of a vertex. The well-known algorithm of Brandes [J. Math. Sociol.~'01] computes, on an $n$-vertex and $m$-edge graph, the betweenness centrality of all vertices in $O(nm)$ worst-case time. In later work, significant empirical speedups were achieved by preprocessing degree-one vertices and by graph partitioning based on cut vertices. We contribute an algorithmic treatment of degree-two vertices, which turns out to be muc…
Betweenness centrality is a popular centrality measure with applications in several domains, and whose exact computation is impractical for modern-sized networks. We present SILVAN, a novel, efficient algorithm to compute, with high probability, accurate estimates of the betweenness centrality of all nodes of a graph and a high-quality approximation of the top-k betweenness centralities. SILVAN follows a progressive sampling approach, and builds on novel bounds based on Monte-Carlo Empirical Rademacher Averages, a powerful and flexible tool from statistical learning theory. SILVAN relies on a …
Betweenness is a well-known centrality measure that ranks the nodes according to their participation in the shortest paths of a network. In several scenarios, having a high betweenness can have a positive impact on the node itself. Hence, in this paper we consider the problem of determining how much a vertex can increase its centrality by creating a limited amount of new edges incident to it. In particular, we study the problem of maximizing the betweenness score of a given node -- Maximum Betweenness Improvement (MBI) -- and that of maximizing the ranking of a given node -- Maximum Ranking Im…
An important index widely used to analyze social and information networks is betweenness centrality. In this paper, first given a directed network $G$ and a vertex $r\in V(G)$, we present a novel adaptive algorithm for estimating betweenness score of $r$. Our algorithm first computes two subsets of the vertex set of $G$, called $\mathcal{RF}(r)$ and $\mathcal{RT}(r)$, that define the sample spaces of the start-points and the end-points of the samples. Then, it adaptively samples from $\mathcal{RF}(r)$ and $\mathcal{RT}(r)$ and stops as soon as some condition is satisfied. The stopping conditio…
A (Somewhat Dated) Comparative Study of Betweenness Centrality Algorithms on GPU
计算介数中心性（BC）的问题是很重要的分析图在许多实际应用中，如社交网络，生物网络，交通网络，电路等，因为这个问题是计算密集型，研究人员一直在开发算法，使用高性能的计算资源，如超级计算机，集群，图形处理单元（GPU）。当前用于计算BC的GPU算法采用Brandes的顺序算法，对于线程调度、数据结构和原子操作具有不同的折衷。在本文中，我们研究了三个GPU算法计算BC的未加权，有向，无标度网络。我们讨论和衡量他们的平衡线程调度，原子操作，同步和延迟隐藏的设计选择的权衡。我们的程序是用NVIDIA CUDA C编写的，并在NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPU上测试。
The betweenness centrality (BC) of a node in a network (or graph) is a measure of its importance in the network. BC is widely used in a large number of environments such as social networks, transport networks, security/mobile networks and more. We present an O(n)-round distributed algorithm for computing BC of every vertex as well as all pairs shortest paths (APSP) in a directed unweighted network, where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of edges. We also present O(n)-round distributed algorithms for computing APSP and BC in a weighted directed acyclic graph (dag). Our algorithms…
Betweenness centrality is one of the most popular vertex centrality measures in network analysis. Hence, many (sequential and parallel) algorithms to compute or approximate betweenness have been devised. Recent algorithmic advances have made it possible to approximate betweenness very efficiently on shared-memory architectures. Yet, the best shared-memory algorithms can still take hours of running time for large graphs, especially for graphs with a high diameter or when a small relative error is required. In this work, we present an MPI-based generalization of the state-of-the-art shared-memor…
The study of vertex centrality measures is a key aspect of network analysis. Naturally, such centrality measures have been generalized to groups of vertices; for popular measures it was shown that the problem of finding the most central group is $\mathcal{NP}$-hard. As a result, approximation algorithms to maximize group centralities were introduced recently. Despite a nearly-linear running time, approximation algorithms for group betweenness and (to a lesser extent) group closeness are rather slow on large networks due to high constant overheads. That is why we introduce GED-Walk centrality, …
We propose the Temporal Walk Centrality, which quantifies the importance of a node by measuring its ability to obtain and distribute information in a temporal network. In contrast to the widely-used betweenness centrality, we assume that information does not necessarily spread on shortest paths but on temporal random walks that satisfy the time constraints of the network. We show that temporal walk centrality can identify nodes playing central roles in dissemination processes that might not be detected by related betweenness concepts and other common static and temporal centrality measures. We…
Centrality rankings such as degree, closeness, betweenness, Katz, PageRank, etc. are commonly used to identify critical nodes in a graph. These methods are based on two assumptions that restrict their wider applicability. First, they assume the exact topology of the network is available. Secondly, they do not take into account the activity over the network and only rely on its topology. However, in many applications, the network is autonomous, vast, and distributed, and it is hard to collect the exact topology. At the same time, the underlying pairwise activity between node pairs is not unifor…
The betweenness centrality of a vertex v is an important centrality measure that quantifies how many optimal paths between pairs of other vertices visit v. Computing betweenness centrality in a temporal graph, in which the edge set may change over discrete timesteps, requires us to count temporal paths that are optimal with respect to some criterion. For several natural notions of optimality, including foremost or fastest temporal paths, this counting problem reduces to #Temporal Path, the problem of counting all temporal paths between a fixed pair of vertices; like the problems of counting fo…
Knowledge graphs play a central role for linking different data which leads to multiple layers. Thus, they are widely used in big data integration, especially for connecting data from different domains. Few studies have investigated the questions how multiple layers within graphs impact methods and algorithms developed for single-purpose networks, for example social networks. This manuscript investigates the impact of multiple layers on centrality measures compared to single-purpose graph. In particular, (a) we develop an experimental environment to (b) evaluate two different centrality measur…
