Three-step Algorithms for Detection of High Degree Nodes in Online Social Networks

This paper considers the problem of influential users detection in online social networks. Identifying of such key entities is of interest in many areas: marketing, politics, information security, business. The degree of the node of the corresponding graph is used as a popularity indicator in this work. Network query limitation is the main challenge in discovering their structure. Therefore, our task is to detect a percentage of the highest degree network nodes under a budget restriction. We propose a three-step crawling algorithm in two versions to solve the problem. We experimentally show its efficiency at various budget limits and superiority over known crawling strategies. For example, to detect top-1% of hubs with 90% precision, one needs to crawl 5% of graph nodes in average with our 3-StepBatch algorithm. We also show that our algorithm performs well for different target set sizes, from 0.01% to 10% of the graph.