Approximating Betweenness Centrality

Betweenness is a centrality measure based on shortest paths, widely used in complex network analysis. It is computationally-expensive to exactly determine betweenness; currently the fastest-known algorithm by Brandes requires O(nm) time for unweighted graphs and O(nm + n2 log n) time for weighted graphs, where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of edges in the network. These are also the worstcase time bounds for computing the betweenness score of a single vertex. In this paper, we present a novel approximation algorithm for computing betweenness centrality of a given vertex, for both weighted and unweighted graphs. Our approximation algorithm is based on an adaptive sampling technique that significantly reduces the number of single-source shortest path computations for vertices with high centrality. We conduct an extensive experimental study on real-world graph instances, and observe that our random sampling algorithm gives very good betweenness approximations for biolog...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WAW
• Authors: David A. Bader, Shiva Kintali, Kamesh Madduri, Milena Mihail
• Keywords: Algorithms, Approximation Algorithm, Shortest Path, Unweighted Graphs, WAW 2007