Abstract

How does a ‘normal ’ computer (or social) network look like? How can we spot ‘abnormal ’ sub-networks in the Internet, or web graph? The answer to such questions is vital for outlier detection (terrorist networks, or illegal money-laundering rings), forecasting, and simulations (“how will a computer virus spread?”). The heart of the problem is finding the properties of real graphs that seem to persist over multiple disciplines. We list such “laws ” and, more importantly, we propose a simple, parsimonious model, the “recursive matrix ” (R-MAT) model, which can quickly generate realistic graphs, capturing the essence of each graph in only a few parameters. Contrary to existing generators, our model can trivially generate weighted, directed and bipartite graphs; it subsumes the celebrated Erdős-Rényi model as a special case; it can match the power law behaviors, as well as the deviations from them (like the “winner does not take it all ” model of Pennock et al. [21]). We present results on multiple, large real graphs, where we show that our parameter fitting algorithm (AutoMAT-fast) fits them very well. 1

Citations