An efficient algorithm for approximate betweenness centrality computation

Betweenness centrality is an important centrality measure widely used in social network analysis, route planning etc. However, even for mid-size networks, it is practically intractable to compute exact betweenness scores. In this paper, we propose a generic randomized framework for unbiased approximation of betweenness centrality. The proposed framework can be adapted with different sampling techniques and give diverse methods. We discuss the conditions a promising sampling technique should satisfy to minimize the approximation error and present a sampling method partially satisfying the conditions. We perform extensive experiments and show the high efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.