This paper introduces a novel algorithm for cardinality, i.e., the number of nodes, estimation in large scale anonymous graphs using statistical inference methods. Applications of this work include estimating the number of sensor devices, online social users, active protein cells, etc. In anonymous graphs, each node possesses little or non-existing information on the network topology. In particular, this paper assumes that each node only knows its unique identifier. The aim is to estimate the cardinality of the graph and the neighbours of each node by querying a small portion of them. While the former allows the design of more efficient coding schemes for the network, the second provides a reliable way for routing packets. As a reference for comparison, this work considers the Best Linear Unbiased Estimators (BLUE). For dense graphs and specific running times, the proposed algorithm produces a cardinality estimate proportional to the BLUE. Furthermore, for an arbitrary number of iterations, the estimate converges to the BLUE as the number of queried nodes tends to the total number of nodes in the network. Simulation results confirm the theoretical results by revealing that, for a moderate running time, asking a small group of nodes is sufficient to perform an estimation of 95 of the whole network.
The authors in @cite_13 @cite_18 propose a model for estimating the network parameters using random walks in graphs. In particular, by sampling from the graph, they propose a method to determine the average edge degree rather than the individual node degree. The problem of estimating the mean degree of a graph is first suggested by @cite_8 . The authors in @cite_10 present a sampling method for node degree estimations in a sampled network and the authors in @cite_3 show a way to obtain content properties by testing a small set of vertices in the graph.
@cite_13 @cite_18 @cite_8 @cite_3 @cite_10
2075709248 2062833795 2103799649 1994312128 1540064387 1693225151 2107648668 1544306684 2120511087 2336754337 2124450885 2170362389 2028897509 2114244473 2090914728 1978479505 2150516767 2508909698 2112976607 2042359627
Networks are characterized by nodes and edges. While there has been a spate of recent work on estimating the number of nodes in a network, the edge-estimation question appears to be largely unaddressed. In this work we consider the problem of estimating the average degree of a large network using efficient random sampling, where the number of nodes is not known to the algorithm. We propose a new estimator for this problem that relies on access to node samples under a prescribed distribution. Next, we show how to efficiently realize this ideal estimator in a random walk setting. Our estimator has a natural and simple implementation using random walks; we bound its performance in terms of the mixing time of the underlying graph. We then show that our estimators are both provably and practically better than many natural estimators for the problem. Our work contrasts with existing theoretical work on estimating average degree, which assume that a uniform random sample of nodes is available and the number of nodes is known. Sampling from large graphs is an area of great interest, especially since the emergence of huge structures such as Online Social Networks (OSNs) and the World Wide Web (WWW). These networks, when viewed as graphs, often contain hundreds of millions of vertices and billions of edges. The large scale properties of a network can be summarized in terms of parameters of the underlying graph, such as the total number of vertices, edges and triangles. The large size of these networks makes it computationally expensive to obtain such structural properties of the underlying graph by exhaustive search. If we can estimate these properties by taking small but representative samples from the network, then size is no longer such a problem. In this paper we present a general framework to estimate network properties using random walks. These methods work under the assumption we are able to obtain local characteristics of a vertex during each step of the random walk, for example the number and labels of the neighboring vertices of a specific vertex These assumptions are relatively reasonable in practice, but may add some additional query cost to each step of the random walk. We also present some practical methods to estimate the total number of edges links m, number of vertices nodes n and number of connected triads of vertices (triangles) t in graphs with degree distributions which follow a power-law and higher number of triangles higher than expected in random graphs. We use these graphs since they tend to better correspond to the structure of large online networks, and in fact some of the data used are taken from such a network. Additionally we present experimental estimates for n, m, t we obtained using our methods on real or manufactured networks. In order to make the methods practical, the total number of steps made by the walk was limited to at most the size n of the network. In fact the results appear to converge for a lower number of steps, indicating that our proposed methods are feasible in practice. Estimating characteristics of large graphs via sampling is a vital part of the study of complex networks. Current sampling methods such as (independent) random vertex and random walks are useful but have drawbacks. Random vertex sampling may require too many resources (time, bandwidth, or money). Random walks, which normally require fewer resources per sample, can suffer from large estimation errors in the presence of disconnected or loosely connected graphs. In this work we propose a new m-dimensional random walk that uses m dependent random walkers. We show that the proposed sampling method, which we call Frontier sampling, exhibits all of the nice sampling properties of a regular random walk. At the same time, our simulations over large real world graphs show that, in the presence of disconnected or loosely connected components, Frontier sampling exhibits lower estimation errors than regular random walks. We also show that Frontier sampling is more suitable than random vertex sampling to sample the tail of the degree distribution of the graph. Estimating characteristics of large graphs via sampling is vital in the study of complex networks. In this work, we study the Mean Squared Error (MSE) associated with different sampling methods for the degree distribution. These sampling methods include independent random vertex (RV) and random edge (RE) sampling, and crawling methods such as random walks (RWs) and the widely used Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for uniformly sampling vertices (MHRWu). We see that the RW MSE is upper bounded by a quantity that is proportional to the RE MSE and inversely proportional to the spectral gap of the RW transition probability matrix. We also determine conditions under which RW is preferable to RV. Finally, we present an approximation of the MHRWu MSE. We evaluate the accuracy of our approximations and bounds through simulations on large real world graphs. Mapping the Internet generally consists in sampling the network from a limited set of sources by using "traceroute"-like probes. This methodology, akin to the merging of different spanning trees to a set of destinations, has been argued to introduce uncontrolled sampling biases that might produce statistical properties of the sampled graph which sharply differ from the original ones. Here we explore these biases and provide a statistical analysis of their origin. We derive a mean-field analytical approximation for the probability of edge and vertex detection that exploits the role of the number of sources and targets and allows us to relate the global topological properties of the underlying network with the statistical accuracy of the sampled graph. In particular we find that the edge and vertex detection probability is depending on the betweenness centrality of each element. This allows us to show that shortest path routed sampling provides a better characterization of underlying graphs with scale-free topology. We complement the analytical discussion with a throughout numerical investigation of simulated mapping strategies in different network models. We show that sampled graphs provide a fair qualitative characterization of the statistical properties of the original networks in a fair range of different strategies and exploration parameters. The numerical study also allows the identification of intervals of the exploration parameters that optimize the fraction of nodes and edges discovered in the sampled graph. This finding might hint the steps toward more efficient mapping strategies. Despite great effort spent measuring topological features of large networks like the Internet, it was recently argued that sampling based on taking paths through the network (e.g., traceroutes) introduces a fundamental bias in the observed degree distribution. We examine this bias analytically and experimentally. For classic random graphs with mean degree c, we show analytically that traceroute sampling gives an observed degree distribution P(k) 1 k for k < c, even though the underlying degree distribution is Poisson. For graphs whose degree distributions have power-law tails P(k) k^-alpha, the accuracy of traceroute sampling is highly sensitive to the population of low-degree vertices. In particular, when the graph has a large excess (i.e., many more edges than vertices), traceroute sampling can significantly misestimate alpha. Considerable attention has been focused on the properties of graphs derived from Internet measurements. Router-level topologies collected via traceroute-like methods have led some to conclude that the router graph of the Internet is well modeled as a power-law random graph. In such a graph, the degree distribution of nodes follows a distribution with a power-law tail. We argue that the evidence to date for this conclusion is at best insufficient We show that when graphs are sampled using traceroute-like methods, the resulting degree distribution can differ sharply from that of the underlying graph. For example, given a sparse Erdos-Renyi random graph, the subgraph formed by a collection of shortest paths from a small set of random sources to a larger set of random destinations can exhibit a degree distribution remarkably like a power-law. We explore the reasons for how this effect arises, and show that in such a setting, edges are sampled in a highly biased manner. This insight allows us to formulate tests for determining when sampling bias is present. When we apply these tests to a number of well-known datasets, we find strong evidence for sampling bias. Despite recent effort to estimate topology characteristics of large graphs (i.e., online social networks and peer-to-peer networks), little attention has been given to develop a formal methodology to characterize the vast amount of content distributed over these networks. Due to the large scale nature of these networks, exhaustive enumeration of this content is computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we show how one can obtain content properties by sampling only a small fraction of vertices. We first show that when sampling is naively applied, this can produce a huge bias in content statistics (i.e., average number of content duplications). To remove this bias, one may use maximum likelihood estimation to estimate content characteristics. However our experimental results show that one needs to sample most vertices in the graph to obtain accurate statistics using such a method. To address this challenge, we propose two efficient estimators: special copy estimator (SCE) and weighted copy estimator (WCE) to measure content characteristics using available information in sampled contents. SCE uses the special content copy indicator to compute the estimate, while WCE derives the estimate based on meta-information in sampled vertices. We perform experiments to show WCE and SCE are cost effective and also asymptotically unbiased ''. Our methodology provides a new tool for researchers to efficiently query content distributed in large scale networks. Understanding the structure of the Internet graph is a crucial step for building accurate network models and designing efficient algorithms for Internet applications. Yet, obtaining its graph structure is a surprisingly difficult task, as edges cannot be explicitly queried. Instead, empirical studies rely on traceroutes to build what are essentially single-source, all-destinations, shortest-path trees. These trees only sample a fraction of the network's edges, and a recent paper by found empirically that the resuting sample is intrinsically biased. For instance, the observed degree distribution under traceroute sampling exhibits a power law even when the underlying degree distribution is Poisson.In this paper, we study the bias of traceroute sampling systematically, and, for a very general class of underlying degree distributions, calculate the likely observed distributions explicitly. To do this, we use a continuous-time realization of the process of exposing the BFS tree of a random graph with a given degree distribution, calculate the expected degree distribution of the tree, and show that it is sharply concentrated. As example applications of our machinery, we show how traceroute sampling finds power-law degree distributions in both δ-regular and Poisson-distributed random graphs. Thus, our work puts the observations of on a rigorous footing, and extends them to nearly arbitrary degree distributions. Random walk is an important tool in many graph mining applications including estimating graph parameters, sampling portions of the graph, and extracting dense communities. In this paper we consider the problem of sampling nodes from a large graph according to a prescribed distribution by using random walk as the basic primitive. Our goal is to obtain algorithms that make a small number of queries to the graph but output a node that is sampled according to the prescribed distribution. Focusing on the uniform distribution case, we study the query complexity of three algorithms and show a near-tight bound expressed in terms of the parameters of the graph such as average degree and the mixing time. Both theoretically and empirically, we show that some algorithms are preferable in practice than the others. We also extend our study to the problem of sampling nodes according to some polynomial function of their degrees; this has implications for designing efficient algorithms for applications such as triangle counting. Sampling is a standard approach in big-graph analytics; the goal is to efficiently estimate the graph properties by consulting a sample of the whole population. A perfect sample is assumed to mirror every property of the whole population. Unfortunately, such a perfect sample is hard to collect in complex populations such as graphs (e.g. web graphs, social networks), where an underlying network connects the units of the population. Therefore, a good sample will be representative in the sense that graph properties of interest can be estimated with a known degree of accuracy. While previous work focused particularly on sampling schemes to estimate certain graph properties (e.g. triangle count), much less is known for the case when we need to estimate various graph properties with the same sampling scheme. In this paper, we pro- pose a generic stream sampling framework for big-graph analytics, called Graph Sample and Hold (gSH), which samples from massive graphs sequentially in a single pass, one edge at a time, while maintaining a small state in memory. We use a Horvitz-Thompson construction in conjunction with a scheme that samples arriving edges without adjacencies to previously sampled edges with probability p and holds edges with adjacencies with probability q. Our sample and hold framework facilitates the accurate estimation of subgraph patterns by enabling the dependence of the sampling process to vary based on previous history. Within our framework, we show how to produce statistically unbiased estimators for various graph properties from the sample. Given that the graph analytics will run on a sample instead of the whole population, the runtime complexity is kept under control. Moreover, given that the estimators are unbiased, the approximation error is also kept under control. Finally, we test the performance of the proposed framework (gSH) on various types of graphs, showing that from a sample with -- 40K edges, it produces estimates with relative errors We consider the issue of protection in very large networks displaying randomness in topology. We employ random graph models to describe such networks, and obtain probabilistic bounds on several parameters related to reliability. In particular, we take the case of random regular networks for simplicity and consider the length of primary and backup paths in terms of the number of hops. First, for a randomly picked pair of nodes, we derive a lower bound on the average distance between the pair and discuss the tightness of the bound. In addition, noting that primary and protection paths form cycles, we obtain a lower bound on the average length of the shortest cycle around the pair. Finally, we show that the protected connections of a given maximum finite length are rare. We then generalize our network model so that different degrees are allowed according to some arbitrary distribution, and show that the second moment of degree over the first moment is an important shorthand for behavior of a network. Notably, we show that most of the results in regular networks carry over with minor modifications, which significantly broadens the scope of networks to which our approach applies. We present as an example the case of networks with a power-law degree distribution. We study the statistical properties of the sampled scale-free networks, deeply related to the proper identification of various real-world networks. We exploit three methods of sampling and investigate the topological properties such as degree and betweenness centrality distribution, average path length, assortativity, and clustering coefficient of sampled networks compared with those of original networks. It is found that the quantities related to those properties in sampled networks appear to be estimated quite differently for each sampling method. We explain why such a biased estimation of quantities would emerge from the sampling procedure and give appropriate criteria for each sampling method to prevent the quantities from being overestimated or underestimated. A statistical approach to a posteriori blockmodeling for graphs is proposed. The model assumes that the vertices of the graph are partitioned into two unknown blocks and that the probability of an edge between two vertices depends only on the blocks to which they belong. Statistical procedures are derived for estimating the probabilities of edges and for predicting the block structure from observations of the edge pattern only. ML estimators can be computed using the EM algorithm, but this strategy is practical only for small graphs. A Bayesian estimator, based on Gibbs sampling, is proposed. This estimator is practical also for large graphs. When ML estimators are used, the block structure can be predicted based on predictive likelihood. When Gibbs sampling is used, the block structure can be predicted from posterior predictive probabilities. A side result is that when the number of vertices tends to infinity while the probabilities remain constant, the block structure can be recovered correctly with probability tending to 1. (Less) Graph datasets with billions of edges, such as social and Web graphs, are prevalent. To be feasible, computation on such large graphs should scale linearly with graph size. All-distances sketches (ADSs) are emerging as a powerful tool for scalable computation of some basic properties of individual nodes or the whole graph. ADSs were first proposed two decades ago (Cohen 1994) and more recent algorithms include ANF (Palmer, Gibbons, and Faloutsos 2002) and hyperANF (Boldi, Rosa, and Vigna 2011). A sketch of logarithmic size is computed for each node in the graph and the computation in total requires only a near linear number of edge relaxations. From the ADS of a node, we can estimate neighborhood cardinalities (the number of nodes within some query distance) and closeness centrality. More generally we can estimate the distance distribution, effective diameter, similarities, and other parameters of the full graph. We make several contributions which facilitate a more effective use of ADSs for scalable analysis of massive graphs. We provide, for the first time, a unified exposition of ADS algorithms and applications. We present the Historic Inverse Probability (HIP) estimators which are applied to the ADS of a node to estimate a large natural class of queries including neighborhood cardinalities and closeness centralities. We show that our HIP estimators have at most half the variance of previous neighborhood cardinality estimators and that this is essentially optimal. Moreover, HIP obtains a polynomial improvement over state of the art for more general domain queries and the estimators are simple, flexible, unbiased, and elegant. The ADS generalizes Min-Hash sketches, used for approximating cardinality (distinct count) on data streams. We obtain lower bounds on Min-Hash cardinality estimation using classic estimation theory. We illustrate the power of HIP, both in terms of ease of application and estimation quality, by comparing it to the HyperLogLog algorithm ( 2007), demonstrating a significant improvement over this state-of-the-art practical algorithm. We also study the quality of ADS estimation of distance ranges, generalizing the near-linear time factor-2 approximation of the diameter. Random graphs with a given degree sequence are a useful model capturing several features absent in the classical Erd˝os-Renyi model, such as dependent edges and non-binomial degrees. In this paper, we use a characterization due to Erd˝os and Gallai to develop a sequential algorithm for generating a random labeled graph with a given degree sequence. The algorithm is easy to implement and allows surprisingly ecient sequential importance sampling. Applications are given, in- cluding simulating a biological network and estimating the number of graphs with a given degree sequence. 1. Introduction. Random graphs with given vertex degrees have recently attracted great interest as a model for many real-world complex networks, including the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer networks, social networks, and biological networks. Newman (58) contains an excellent survey of these networks, with extensive references. A common approach to simulating these systems is to study (empirically or theoretically) the degrees of the vertices in instances of the network, and then to generate a random graph with the appropriate degrees. Graphs with prescribed degrees also appear in random matrix theory and string theory, which can call for large simulations based on random k-regular graphs. Throughout, we are concerned with generating simple graphs, i.e., no loops or multiple edges are allowed (the problem becomes considerably easier if loops and multiple edges are allowed). The main result of this paper is a new sequential importance sampling algorithm for generating random graphs with a given degree sequence. The idea is to build up the graph sequentially, at each stage choosing an edge from a list of candidates with probability proportional to the degrees. Most previously studied algorithms for this problem sometimes either get stuck or produce loops or multiple edges in the output, which is handled by starting over and trying again. Often for such algorithms, the probability of a restart being needed on a trial rapidly approaches 1 as the degree parameters grow, resulting in an enormous number of trials being needed on average to obtain a simple graph. A major advantage of our algorithm is that it never gets stuck. This is achieved using the Erd˝os- Gallai characterization, which is explained in Section 2, and a carefully chosen order of edge selection. We use random sampling as a tool for solving undirected graph problems. We show that the sparse graph, or skeleton, that arises when we randomly sample a graph's edges will accurately approximate the value of all cuts in the original graph with high probability. This makes sampling effective for problems involving cuts in graphs. We present fast randomized (Monte Carlo and Las Vegas) algorithms for approximating and exactly finding minimum cuts and maximum flows in unweighted, undirected graphs. Our cut-approximation algorithms extend unchanged to weighted graphs while our weighted-graph flow algorithms are somewhat slower. Our approach gives a general paradigm with potential applications to any packing problem. It has since been used in a near-linear time algorithm for finding minimum cuts, as well as faster cut and flow algorithms. Our sampling theorems also yield faster algorithms for several other cut-based problems, including approximating the best balanced cut of a graph, finding a k-connected orientation of a 2k-connected graph, and finding integral multicommodity flows in graphs with a great deal of excess capacity. Our methods also improve the efficiency of some parallel cut and flow algorithms. Our methods also apply to the network design problem, where we wish to build a network satisfying certain connectivity requirements between vertices. We can purchase edges of various costs and wish to satisfy the requirements at minimum total cost. Since our sampling theorems apply even when the sampling probabilities are different for different edges, we can apply randomized rounding to solve network design problems. This gives approximation algorithms that guarantee much better approximations than previous algorithms whenever the minimum connectivity requirement is large. As a particular example, we improve the best approximation bound for the minimum k-connected subgraph problem from 1.85 to [math not displayed]. We develop an information-theoretic view of the stochastic block model, a popular statistical model for the large-scale structure of complex networks. A graph G from such a model is generated by first assigning vertex labels at random from a finite alphabet, and then connecting vertices with edge probabilities depending on the labels of the endpoints. In the case of the symmetric two-group model, we establish an explicit ‘single-letter’ characterization of the per-vertex mutual information between the vertex labels and the graph, when the graph average degree diverges. The explicit expression of the mutual information is intimately related to estimation-theoretic quantities, and -in particular- reveals a phase transition at the critical point for community detection. Below the critical point the per-vertex mutual information is asymptotically the same as if edges were independent of the vertex labels. Correspondingly, no algorithm can estimate the partition better than random guessing. Conversely, above the threshold, the per-vertex mutual information is strictly smaller than the independent-edges upper bound. In this regime there exists a procedure that estimates the vertex labels better than random guessing. We consider a family of random graphs with a given expected degree sequence. Each edge is chosen independently with probability proportional to the product of the expected degrees of its endpoints. We examine the distribution of the sizes volumes of the connected components which turns out depending primarily on the average degree d and the second-order average degree d . Here d denotes the weighted average of squares of the expected degrees. For example, we prove that the giant component exists if the expected average degree d is at least 1, and there is no giant component if the expected second-order average degree d is at most 1. Examples are given to illustrate that both bounds are best possible. Breadth First Search (BFS) and other graph traversal techniques are widely used for measuring large unknown graphs, such as online social networks. It has been empirically observed that incomplete BFS is biased toward high degree nodes. In contrast to more studied sampling techniques, such as random walks, the bias of BFS has not been characterized to date. In this paper, we quantify the degree bias of BFS sampling. In particular, we calculate the node degree distribution expected to be observed by BFS as a function of the fraction of covered nodes, in a random graph RG(p k ) with a given (and arbitrary) degree distribution p k . Furthermore, we also show that, for RG(p k ), all commonly used graph traversal techniques (BFS, DFS, Forest Fire, and Snowball Sampling) lead to the same bias, and we show how to correct for this bias. To give a broader perspective, we compare this class of exploration techniques to random walks that are well-studied and easier to analyze. Next, we study by simulation the effect of graph properties not captured directly by our model. We find that the bias gets amplified in graphs with strong positive assortativity. Finally, we demonstrate the above results by sampling the Facebook social network, and we provide some practical guidelines for graph sampling in practice.