Issue No. 03 - March (2018 vol. 29)
ISSN: 1045-9219
pp: 659-672
Fuad Jamour , King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Spiros Skiadopoulos , University of the Peloponnese, Tripoli, Greece
Panos Kalnis , King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
ABSTRACT
Betweenness centrality quantifies the importance of nodes in a graph in many applications, including network analysis, community detection and identification of influential users. Typically, graphs in such applications evolve over time. Thus, the computation of betweenness centrality should be performed incrementally. This is challenging because updating even a single edge may trigger the computation of all-pairs shortest paths in the entire graph. Existing approaches cannot scale to large graphs: they either require excessive memory (i.e., quadratic to the size of the input graph) or perform unnecessary computations rendering them prohibitively slow. We propose $i$ Central; a novel incremental algorithm for computing betweenness centrality in evolving graphs. We decompose the graph into biconnected components and prove that processing can be localized within the affected components. $i$ Central is the first algorithm to support incremental betweeness centrality computation within a graph component. This is done efficiently, in linear space; consequently, $i$ Central scales to large graphs. We demonstrate with real datasets that the serial implementation of $i$ Central is up to 3.7 times faster than existing serial methods. Our parallel implementation that scales to large graphs, is an order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art parallel algorithm, while using an order of magnitude less computational resources.
INDEX TERMS
Measurement, Random access memory, Parallel algorithms, Heuristic algorithms, Algorithm design and analysis, Social network services, Memory management
CITATION

F. Jamour, S. Skiadopoulos and P. Kalnis, "Parallel Algorithm for Incremental Betweenness Centrality on Large Graphs," in IEEE Transactions on Parallel & Distributed Systems, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 659-672, 2018.
doi:10.1109/TPDS.2017.2763951