English

Faster Betweenness Centrality Updates in Evolving Networks

Data Structures and Algorithms 2017-04-28 v1

Abstract

Finding central nodes is a fundamental problem in network analysis. Betweenness centrality is a well-known measure which quantifies the importance of a node based on the fraction of shortest paths going though it. Due to the dynamic nature of many today's networks, algorithms that quickly update centrality scores have become a necessity. For betweenness, several dynamic algorithms have been proposed over the years, targeting different update types (incremental- and decremental-only, fully-dynamic). In this paper we introduce a new dynamic algorithm for updating betweenness centrality after an edge insertion or an edge weight decrease. Our method is a combination of two independent contributions: a faster algorithm for updating pairwise distances as well as number of shortest paths, and a faster algorithm for updating dependencies. Whereas the worst-case running time of our algorithm is the same as recomputation, our techniques considerably reduce the number of operations performed by existing dynamic betweenness algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.08592,
  title  = {Faster Betweenness Centrality Updates in Evolving Networks},
  author = {Elisabetta Bergamini and Henning Meyerhenke and Mark Ortmann and Arie Slobbe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.08592},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Accepted at the 16th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2017)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:29:48.416Z