Publications Details

MaxReach: Reducing network incompleteness through node probes

Soundarajan, Sucheta; Eliassi-Rad, Tina; Gallagher, Brian; Pinar, Ali P.

Real-world network datasets are often incomplete. Subsequently, any analysis on such networks is likely to produce skewed results. We examine the following problem: given an incomplete network, which b nodes should be probed to bring as many new nodes as possible into the observed network? For instance, consider someone who has observed a portion (say 1%) of the Twitter network. How should she use a limited budget to reduce the incompleteness of the network? In this work, we propose a novel algorithm, called MAXREACH, which uses a budget b to increase the number of nodes in the observed network. Our experiments, across a range of datasets and conditions, demonstrate the efficacy of MAXREACH.