Fast and Simple Computation of Top-k Closeness Centralities

Closeness is an important centrality measure widely used in the analysis of real-world complex networks. In particular, the problem of selecting the k most central nodes with respect to this measure has been deeply analyzed in the last decade. However, even for not very large networks, this problem is computationally intractable in practice: indeed, Abboud et al have recently shown that its complexity is strictly related to the complexity of the All-Pairs Shortest Path (in short, APSP) problem, for which no subcubic "combinatorial" algorithm is known. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for selecting the k most closeness central nodes in a graph. In practice, this algorithm significantly improves over the APSP approach, even though its worst-case time complexity is the same. For example, the algorithm is able to compute the top k nodes in few dozens of seconds even when applied to real-world networks with millions of nodes and edges. We will also experimentally prove that our algorithm drastically outperforms the most recently designed algorithm, proposed by Olsen et al. Finally, we apply the new algorithm to the computation of the most central actors in the IMDB collaboration network, where two actors are linked if they played together in a movie.