Efficient Computation of Betweenness Centrality by Graph Decompositions and Their Applications to Real-World Networks

Abstract

Betweenness centrality is one of the most significant and commonly used centralities, where centrality is a notion of measuring the importance of nodes in networks. In 2001, Brandes proposed an algorithm for computing betweenness centrality efficiently, and it can compute those values for all nodes in O(nm) time for unweighted networks, where n and m denote the number of nodes and links in networks, respectively. However, even Brandes' algorithm is not fast enough for recent large-scale real-world networks, and therefore, much faster algorithms are expected. The objective of this research is to theoretically improve the efficiency of Brandes' algorithm by introducing graph decompositions, and to verify the practical effectiveness of our approaches by implementing them as computer programs and by applying them to various kinds of real-world networks. A series of computational experiments shows that our proposed algorithms run several times faster than the original Brandes' algorithm, which are guaranteed by theoretical analyses.