Title
Measuring Bias In The Mixing Time Of Social Graphs Due To Graph Sampling
Abstract
Sampling of large social graphs is used for addressing infeasibility of measurements in large social graphs, or for crawling graphs from online social network services where accessing an entire social graph at once is often impossible. Sampling algorithms aim at maintaining certain properties of the original graphs in the sampled (or crawled) ones. Several sampling algorithms, such as breadth-first search, standard random walk, and Metropolis-Hastings random walk, among others, are widely used in the literature for sampling graphs. Some of these sampling algorithms are known for their bias, mainly towards high degree nodes, while bias for other metrics is not well-studied. In this paper we consider the bias of sampling algorithms on the mixing time. We quantitatively show that some existing sampling algorithms, even those which are unbiased to the degree distribution, always produce biased estimation of the mixing time of social graphs. We argue that bias in sampling algorithms accepted in the literature is rather metric-dependent, and a given sampling algorithm, while may work nicely and unbiased to one property, may produce considerable amount of bias in other properties.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/MILCOM.2012.6415714
2012 IEEE MILITARY COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE (MILCOM 2012)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Mixing Time, Social graphs, Biased estimation, Sampling
Random graph,Social graph,Random walk,Computer science,Computer network,Theoretical computer science,Degree distribution,Artificial intelligence,Gibbs sampling,Graph theory,Stochastic process,Sampling (statistics),Machine learning
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2155-7578
5
0.54
References 
Authors
27
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Abedelaziz Mohaisen133830.36
Pengkui Luo2111.74
Yanhua Li353947.45
Yongdae Kim41944125.44
Zhi-Li Zhang54063317.10