Shortest Path Analysis in Social Graphs

Abstract

The shortest path problem is among the most fundamental combinatorial optimization problems to answer reachability queries. It is hard to deter-mine which vertices or edges are visited during shortest path traversals. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis on how traversal algorithms behave on social networks. First, we compute the shortest paths between set of vertices. Each shortest path is considered as one transaction. Second, we utilize the pat-tern mining approach to identify the frequency of occurrence of the vertices. We evaluate the results in terms of network properties, i.e. degree distribution, clustering coefficient.