Faster random walks by rewiring online social networks on-the-fly

Zhuojie Zhou, Nan Zhang, Zhiguo Gong, Gautam Das

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Many online social networks feature restrictive web interfaces which only allow the query of a user's local neighborhood through the interface. To enable analytics over such an online social network through its restrictive web interface, many recent efforts reuse the existing Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods such as random walks to sample the social network and support analytics based on the samples. The problem with such an approach, however, is the large amount of queries often required (i.e., a long "mixing time") for a random walk to reach a desired (stationary) sampling distribution. In this paper, we consider a novel problem of enabling a faster random walk over online social networks by "rewiring" the social network on-the-fly. Specifically, we develop Modified TOpology (MTO)-Sampler which, by using only information exposed by the restrictive web interface, constructs a "virtual" overlay topology of the social network while performing a random walk, and ensures that the random walk follows the modified overlay topology rather than the original one. We show that MTO-Sampler not only provably enhances the efficiency of sampling, but also achieves significant savings on query cost over real-world online social networks such as Google Plus, Epinion etc.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICDE 2013 - 29th International Conference on Data Engineering
Pages769-780
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event29th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2013 - Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Duration: Apr 8 2013Apr 11 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering
ISSN (Print)1084-4627

Other

Other29th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2013
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityBrisbane, QLD
Period4/8/134/11/13

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Information Systems

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