research-article

Inferring coarse views of connectivity in very large graphs

Authors:

Walter Willinger,

Roberto GonzalezAuthors Info & Claims

COSN '14: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Online social networks

Pages 191 - 202

https://doi.org/10.1145/2660460.2660480

Published: 01 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a simple framework, called WalkAbout, to infer a coarse view of connectivity in very large graphs; that is, identify well-connected "regions" with different edge densities and determine the corresponding inter- and intra-region connectivity. We leverage the transient behavior of many short random walks (RW) on a large graph that is assumed to have regions of varying edge density but whose structure is otherwise unknown. The key idea is that as RWs approach the mixing time of a region, the ratio of the number of visits by all RWs to the degree for nodes in that region converges to a value proportional to the average node degree in that region. Leveraging this indirect sign of connectivity enables our proposed framework to effectively scale with graph size.

After describing the design of WalkAbout, we demonstrate the capabilities of WalkAbout by applying it to three major OSNs ie Flickr, Twitter, and Google+) and obtaining a coarse view of their connectivity structure. In addition, we illustrate how the communities that are obtained by running a popular community detection method on these OSNs stack up against the WalkAbout-discovered regions. Finally, we examine the "meaning" of the regions obtained by WalkAbout, and demonstrate that users in the identified regions exhibit common social attributes.

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Cited By

Motamedi RJamshidi SRejaie RWillinger W(2019)Examining the evolution of the Twitter elite networkSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-019-0612-810:1Online publication date: 27-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-019-0612-8
Motamedi RRezayi SRejaie RWillinger W(2018)On characterizing the Twitter elite networkProceedings of the 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.5555/3382225.3382276(234-241)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3382225.3382276
Motamedi RRezayi SRejaie RWillinger W(2018)On Characterizing the Twitter Elite Network2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508252(234-241)Online publication date: Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508252

Index Terms

Inferring coarse views of connectivity in very large graphs
1. Mathematics of computing
  1. Discrete mathematics
    1. Graph theory

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cover image ACM Conferences

COSN '14: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Online social networks

October 2014

288 pages

ISBN:9781450331982

DOI:10.1145/2660460

General Chair:
Alessandra Sala
Bell Laboratories, Ireland
,
Program Chairs:
Ashish Goel
Stanford / Twitter, USA
,
Krishna Gummadi
MPI-SWS, Germany

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 October 2014

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COSN'14

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COSN'14: Conference on Online Social Networks

October 1 - 2, 2014

Dublin, Ireland

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COSN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 87 submissions, 29%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 307 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Motamedi RJamshidi SRejaie RWillinger W(2019)Examining the evolution of the Twitter elite networkSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-019-0612-810:1Online publication date: 27-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-019-0612-8
Motamedi RRezayi SRejaie RWillinger W(2018)On characterizing the Twitter elite networkProceedings of the 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.5555/3382225.3382276(234-241)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3382225.3382276
Motamedi RRezayi SRejaie RWillinger W(2018)On Characterizing the Twitter Elite Network2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508252(234-241)Online publication date: Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508252

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