4,110 research outputs found
A Faster Method to Estimate Closeness Centrality Ranking
Closeness centrality is one way of measuring how central a node is in the
given network. The closeness centrality measure assigns a centrality value to
each node based on its accessibility to the whole network. In real life
applications, we are mainly interested in ranking nodes based on their
centrality values. The classical method to compute the rank of a node first
computes the closeness centrality of all nodes and then compares them to get
its rank. Its time complexity is , where represents total
number of nodes, and represents total number of edges in the network. In
the present work, we propose a heuristic method to fast estimate the closeness
rank of a node in time complexity, where . We
also propose an extended improved method using uniform sampling technique. This
method better estimates the rank and it has the time complexity , where . This is an excellent improvement over the
classical centrality ranking method. The efficiency of the proposed methods is
verified on real world scale-free social networks using absolute and weighted
error functions
Degree Ranking Using Local Information
Most real world dynamic networks are evolved very fast with time. It is not
feasible to collect the entire network at any given time to study its
characteristics. This creates the need to propose local algorithms to study
various properties of the network. In the present work, we estimate degree rank
of a node without having the entire network. The proposed methods are based on
the power law degree distribution characteristic or sampling techniques. The
proposed methods are simulated on synthetic networks, as well as on real world
social networks. The efficiency of the proposed methods is evaluated using
absolute and weighted error functions. Results show that the degree rank of a
node can be estimated with high accuracy using only samples of the
network size. The accuracy of the estimation decreases from high ranked to low
ranked nodes. We further extend the proposed methods for random networks and
validate their efficiency on synthetic random networks, that are generated
using Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi model. Results show that the proposed methods can be
efficiently used for random networks as well
Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks
We study the problem of preprocessing a large graph so that point-to-point shortest-path queries can be answered very fast. Computing shortest paths is a well studied problem, but exact algorithms do not scale to huge graphs encountered on the web, social networks, and other applications.
In this paper we focus on approximate methods for distance estimation, in particular using landmark-based distance indexing. This approach involves selecting a subset of nodes as landmarks and computing (offline) the distances from each node in the graph to those landmarks. At runtime, when the distance between a pair of nodes is needed, we can estimate it quickly by combining the precomputed distances of the two nodes to the landmarks.
We prove that selecting the optimal set of landmarks is an NP-hard problem, and thus heuristic solutions need to be employed. Given a budget of memory for the index, which translates directly into a budget of landmarks, different landmark selection strategies can yield dramatically different results in terms of accuracy. A number of simple methods that scale well to large graphs are therefore developed and experimentally compared. The simplest methods choose central nodes of the graph, while the more elaborate ones select central nodes that are also far away from one another. The efficiency of the suggested techniques is tested experimentally using five different real world graphs with millions of edges; for a given accuracy, they require as much as 250 times less space than the current approach in the literature which considers selecting landmarks at random.
Finally, we study applications of our method in two problems arising naturally in large-scale networks, namely, social search and community detection.Yahoo! Research (internship
Discriminative Distance-Based Network Indices with Application to Link Prediction
In large networks, using the length of shortest paths as the distance measure
has shortcomings. A well-studied shortcoming is that extending it to
disconnected graphs and directed graphs is controversial. The second
shortcoming is that a huge number of vertices may have exactly the same score.
The third shortcoming is that in many applications, the distance between two
vertices not only depends on the length of shortest paths, but also on the
number of shortest paths. In this paper, first we develop a new distance
measure between vertices of a graph that yields discriminative distance-based
centrality indices. This measure is proportional to the length of shortest
paths and inversely proportional to the number of shortest paths. We present
algorithms for exact computation of the proposed discriminative indices.
Second, we develop randomized algorithms that precisely estimate average
discriminative path length and average discriminative eccentricity and show
that they give -approximations of these indices. Third, we
perform extensive experiments over several real-world networks from different
domains. In our experiments, we first show that compared to the traditional
indices, discriminative indices have usually much more discriminability. Then,
we show that our randomized algorithms can very precisely estimate average
discriminative path length and average discriminative eccentricity, using only
few samples. Then, we show that real-world networks have usually a tiny average
discriminative path length, bounded by a constant (e.g., 2). Fourth, in order
to better motivate the usefulness of our proposed distance measure, we present
a novel link prediction method, that uses discriminative distance to decide
which vertices are more likely to form a link in future, and show its superior
performance compared to the well-known existing measures
Local Ranking Problem on the BrowseGraph
The "Local Ranking Problem" (LRP) is related to the computation of a
centrality-like rank on a local graph, where the scores of the nodes could
significantly differ from the ones computed on the global graph. Previous work
has studied LRP on the hyperlink graph but never on the BrowseGraph, namely a
graph where nodes are webpages and edges are browsing transitions. Recently,
this graph has received more and more attention in many different tasks such as
ranking, prediction and recommendation. However, a web-server has only the
browsing traffic performed on its pages (local BrowseGraph) and, as a
consequence, the local computation can lead to estimation errors, which hinders
the increasing number of applications in the state of the art. Also, although
the divergence between the local and global ranks has been measured, the
possibility of estimating such divergence using only local knowledge has been
mainly overlooked. These aspects are of great interest for online service
providers who want to: (i) gauge their ability to correctly assess the
importance of their resources only based on their local knowledge, and (ii)
take into account real user browsing fluxes that better capture the actual user
interest than the static hyperlink network. We study the LRP problem on a
BrowseGraph from a large news provider, considering as subgraphs the
aggregations of browsing traces of users coming from different domains. We show
that the distance between rankings can be accurately predicted based only on
structural information of the local graph, being able to achieve an average
rank correlation as high as 0.8
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