Shattering and compressing networks for betweenness centrality

Abstract

The betweenness metric has always been intriguing and used in many analyses. Yet, it is one of the most computationally expensive kernels in graph mining. For that reason, making betweenness centrality computations faster is an important and well-studied problem. In this work, we propose the framework, BADIOS, which compresses a network and shatters it into pieces so that the centrality computation can be handled independently for each piece. Although BADIOS is designed and tuned for betweenness centrality, it can easily be adapted for other centrality metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can be a great arsenal to reduce the centrality computation time for various types and sizes of networks. In particular, it reduces the computation time of a 4.6 million edges graph from more than 5 days to less than 16 hours.