Incremental algorithm for updating betweenness centrality in dynamically growing networks

Abstract

The increasing availability of dynamically growing digital data that can be used for extracting social networks has led to an upsurge of interest in the analysis of dynamic social networks. One key aspect of social network analysis is to understand the central nodes in a network. However, dynamic calculation of centrality values for rapidly growing networks might be unfeasibly expensive, especially if it involves recalculation from scratch for each time period. This paper proposes an incremental algorithm that effectively updates betweenness centralities of nodes in dynamic social networks while avoiding re-computations by exploiting information from earlier computations. Our performance results suggest that our incremental betweenness algorithm can achieve substantial performance speedup, on the order of thousands of times, over the state of the art, including the best-performing non-incremental betweenness algorithm and a recently proposed betweenness update algorithm.