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An incremental algorithm for updating betweenness centrality and k-betweenness centrality and its performance on realistic dynamic social network data

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Abstract

The increasing availability of dynamically changing digital data that can be used for extracting social networks over time has led to an upsurge of interest in the analysis of dynamic social networks. One key aspect of dynamic social network analysis is finding the central nodes in a network. However, dynamic calculation of centrality values for rapidly changing networks can be computationally expensive, with the result that data are frequently aggregated over many time periods and only intermittently analyzed for centrality measures. This paper presents an incremental betweenness centrality algorithm that efficiently updates betweenness centralities or k-betweenness centralities of nodes in dynamic social networks by avoiding re-computations through the efficient storage of information from earlier computations. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms for incremental betweenness centrality and k-betweenness centrality on both synthetic social network data sets and on several real-world social network data sets. The presented incremental algorithm can achieve substantial performance speedup (3–4 orders of magnitude faster for some data sets) when compared to the state of the art. And, incremental k-betweenness centrality, which is a good predictor of betweenness centrality, can be carried out on social network data sets with millions of nodes.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (HDTRA11010102), and by the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied by the DTRA or the US government. This work is done when Miray Kas was a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department.

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  1. Miray Kas

    Present address: Google Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Miray Kas, Kathleen M. Carley & L. Richard Carley

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  1. Miray Kas
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  2. Kathleen M. Carley
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Correspondence to L. Richard Carley.

Additional information

This paper was invited as an extended version of Miray Kas, Matthew Wachs, Kathleen M. Carley, L. Richard Carley. Incremental Algorithm for Updating Betweenness Centrality in Dynamically Growing Networks. The 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), August 25–28, 2013, Niagara Falls, Canada.

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Kas, M., Carley, K.M. & Carley, L.R. An incremental algorithm for updating betweenness centrality and k-betweenness centrality and its performance on realistic dynamic social network data. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 4, 235 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0235-z

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