2013/11/13 by Pinghui Wang, Wang, Pinghui, Bruno Ribeiro +9
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Graph Neural Networks #Caching and Content Delivery #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1311.3037
openalex publication_date 2013/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Characterizing large online social networks (OSNs) through node querying is a challenging task. OSNs often impose severe constraints on the query rate, hence limiting the sample size to a small fraction of the total network. Various ad-hoc subgraph sampling methods have been proposed, but many of them give biased estimates and no theoretical basis on the accuracy. In this work, we focus on developing sampling methods for OSNs where querying a node also reveals partial structural information about its neighbors. Our methods are optimized for NoSQL graph databases (if the database can be accessed directly), or utilize Web API available on most major OSNs for graph sampling. We show that our sampling method has provable convergence guarantees on being an unbiased estimator, and it is more accurate than current state-of-the-art methods. We characterize metrics such as node label density estimation and edge label density estimation, two of the most fundamental network characteristics from which other network characteristics can be derived. We evaluate our methods on-the-fly over several live networks using their native APIs. Our simulation studies over a variety of offline datasets show that by including neighborhood information, our method drastically (4-fold) reduces the number of samples required to achieve the same estimation accuracy of state-of-the-art methods.