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arXiv · 1410.7833

Walk, Not Wait: Faster Sampling Over Online Social Networks

Azade Nazi·Zhuojie Zhou·Saravanan Thirumuruganathan·Nan Zhang·Gautam Das
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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a novel, general purpose, technique for faster sampling of nodes over an online social network. Specifically, unlike traditional random walk which wait for the convergence of sampling distribution to a predetermined target distribution - a waiting process that incurs a high query cost - we develop WALK-ESTIMATE, which starts with a much shorter random walk, and then proactively estimate the sampling probability for the node taken before using acceptance-rejection sampling to adjust the sampling probability to the predetermined target distribution. We present a novel backward random walk technique which provides provably unbiased estimations for the sampling probability, and demonstrate the superiority of WALK-ESTIMATE over traditional random walks through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments over real world online social networks.

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Azade Nazi, Zhuojie Zhou, Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, Nan Zhang, Gautam Das. 2014-11-01. Walk, Not Wait: Faster Sampling Over Online Social Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7833

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