ABRA: Approximating Betweenness Centrality in Static and Dynamic Graphs with Rademacher Averages

We present ABRA, a suite of algorithms to compute and maintain probabilistically-guaranteed, high-quality, approximations of the betweenness centrality of all nodes (or edges) on both static and fully dynamic graphs. Our algorithms use progressive random sampling and their analysis rely on Rademacher averages and pseudodimension, fundamental concepts from statistical learning theory. To our knowledge, this is the first application of these concepts to the field of graph analysis. Our experimental results show that ABRA is much faster than exact methods, and vastly outperforms, in both runtime and number of samples, state-of-the-art algorithms with the same quality guarantees.