Title
Exploring Low-degree Nodes First Accelerates Network Exploration
Abstract
We consider information diffusion on Web-like networks and how random walks can simulate it. A well-studied problem in this domain is Partial Cover Time, i.e., the calculation of the expected number of steps a random walker needs to visit a given fraction of the nodes of the network. We notice that some of the fastest solutions in fact require that nodes have perfect knowledge of the degree distribution of their neighbors, which in many practical cases is not obtainable, e.g., for privacy reasons. We thus introduce a version of the Cover problem that considers such limitations: Partial Cover Time with Budget. The budget is a limit on the number of neighbors that can be inspected for their degree; we have adapted optimal random walks strategies from the literature to operate under such budget. Our solution is called Min-degree (MD) and, essentially, it biases random walkers towards visiting peripheral areas of the network first. Extensive benchmarking on six real datasets proves that the—perhaps counter-intuitive strategy—MD strategy is in fact highly competitive wrt. state-of-the-art algorithms for cover.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3394231.3397914
WebSci '20: 12th ACM Conference on Web Science Southampton United Kingdom July, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-7989-2
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6