Betweenness Centrality -- Incremental and Faster

Abstract

We consider the incremental computation of the betweenness centrality of all vertices in a large complex network modeled as a graph G = (V, E), directed or undirected, with positive real edge-weights. The current widely used algorithm to compute the betweenness centrality of all vertices in G is the Brandes algorithm that runs in O(mn + n^2 log n) time, where n = |V| and m = |E|. We present an incremental algorithm that updates the betweenness centrality score of all vertices in G when a new edge is added to G, or the weight of an existing edge is reduced. Our incremental algorithm runs in O(m' n + n^2) time, where m' is the size of a certain subset of E*, the set of edges in G that lie on a shortest path. We achieve the same bound for the more general incremental update of a vertex v, where the edge update can be performed on any subset of edges incident to v. Our incremental algorithm is the first algorithm that is asymptotically faster on sparse graphs than recomputing with the Brandes algorithm. Our algorithm is also likely to be much faster than the Brandes algorithm on dense graphs since m*, the size of E*, is often close to linear in n. Our incremental algorithm is very simple and the only data structures it uses are arrays, lists, and stack. We give an efficient cache-oblivious implementation that incurs O(scan(n^2) + n sort(m')) cache misses, where scan and sort are well-known measures for efficient caching. We also give a static algorithm for computing betweenness centrality of all vertices that runs in time O(m* n + n^2 log n), which is faster than the Brandes algorithm on any graph with n log n = o(m) and m* = o(m).