Publication Date
2015
Journal or Book Title
Computational Social Networks
Abstract
Preferential attachment (PA) models of network structure are widely used due to their explanatory power and conceptual simplicity. PA models are able to account for the scale-free degree distributions observed in many real-world large networks by sequentially introducing nodes that attach preferentially to existing nodes with high degree. The ability to efficiently generate instances from PA models is a key asset in understanding both the models themselves and the real networks that they represent. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the problem of efficient instance generation. In this paper, we show that the complexity of generating network instances from a PA model depends on the preference function of the model, provides efficient data structures that work under any preference function, and presents empirical results from an implementation based on these data structures. We demonstrate that, by indexing growing networks with a simple augmented heap, we can implement a network generator which scales many orders of magnitude beyond existing capabilities (106 to 108 nodes). We show the utility of an efficient and general PA network generator by investigating the consequences of varying the preference functions of an existing model. We also provide ‘quicknet,’ a freely available open-source implementation of the methods described in this work.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40649-015-0012-9
Volume
2
Issue
7
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Atwood, James; Ribeiro, Bruno; and Towsley, Don, "Efficient network generation under general preferential attachment" (2015). Computational Social Networks. 1338.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40649-015-0012-9