Shattering and Compressing Networks for Centrality Analysis

Abstract

Who is more important in a network? Who controls the flow between the nodes or whose contribution is significant for connections? Centrality metrics play an important role while answering these questions. The betweenness metric is useful for network analysis and implemented in various tools. Since it is one of the most computationally expensive kernels in graph mining, several techniques have been proposed for fast computation of betweenness centrality. In this work, we propose and investigate techniques which compress a network and shatter it into pieces so that the rest of the computation can be handled independently for each piece. Although we designed and tuned the shattering process for betweenness, it can be adapted for other centrality metrics in a straightforward manner. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can be a great arsenal to reduce the centrality computation time for various types of networks.