Sampling on networks: estimating eigenvector centrality on incomplete graphs

Abstract

We develop a new sampling method to estimate eigenvector centrality on incomplete networks. Our goal is to estimate this global centrality measure having at disposal a limited amount of data. This is the case in many real-world scenarios where data collection is expensive, the network is too big for data storage capacity or only partial information is available. The sampling algorithm is theoretically grounded by results derived from spectral approximation theory. We studied the problem on both synthetic and real data and tested the performance comparing with traditional methods, such as random walk and uniform sampling. We show that approximations obtained from such methods are not always reliable and that our algorithm, while preserving computational scalability, improves performance under different error measures.