Incremental algorithms for closeness centrality

Abstract

Centrality metrics have shown to be highly correlated with the importance and loads of the nodes within the network traffic. In this work, we provide fast incremental algorithms for closeness centrality computation. Our algorithms efficiently compute the closeness centrality values upon changes in network topology, i.e., edge insertions and deletions. We show that the proposed techniques are efficient on many real-life networks, especially on small-world networks, which have a small diameter and spike-shaped shortest distance distribution. We experimentally validate the efficiency of our algorithms on large-scale networks and show that they can update the closeness centrality values of 1.2 million authors in the temporal DBLP-coauthorship network 460 times faster than it would take to recompute them from scratch.