BASSET: Scalable Gateway Finder in Large Graphs

Given a social network, who is the best person to introduce you to, say, Chris Ferguson, the poker champion? Or, given a network of people and skills, who is the best person to help you learn about, say, wavelets? The goal is to find a small group of ‘gateways’: persons who are close enough to us, as well as close enough to the target (person, or skill) or, in other words, are crucial in connecting us to the target. The main contributions are the following: (a) we show how to formulate this problem precisely; (b) we show that it is sub-modular and thus it can be solved near-optimally; (c) we give fast, scalable algorithms to find such gateways. Experiments on real data sets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods, achieving up to 6,000,000× speedup.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PAKDD
• Authors: Hanghang Tong, Spiros Papadimitriou, Christos Faloutsos, Philip S. Yu, Tina Eliassi-Rad
• Keywords: Chris Ferguson, Data Mining, PAKDD 2010, Poker Champion, Social Network