Vertex Priority Based Butterfly Counting for Large-scale Bipartite Networks

Bipartite networks are of great importance in many real-world applications. In bipartite networks, butterfly (i.e., a complete 2 x 2 biclique) is the smallest non-trivial cohesive structure and plays a key role. In this paper, we study the problem of efficiently counting the number of butterflies in a bipartite network. This problem has been recently studied. The most efficient existing techniques are based on enumerating wedges which is the dominant cost of counting butterflies. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms can hardly handle large-scale bipartite networks. This becomes a bottleneck in large-scale applications. In this paper, instead of the existing layer-priority-based techniques, we propose a vertex-priority-based paradigm BFC-VP to enumerate much fewer wedges; this leads to a significant improvement of the time complexity of the state-of-the-art algorithm. Moreover, we also present cache-aware strategies to further improve the time efficiency while theoretically retaining the time complexity of BFC-VP. These not only resolve the issue that the existing techniques cannot finish on some real datasets but also extensive empirical studies demonstrate that our techniques can speed up the state-of-the-art techniques by up to two orders of magnitude for the real datasets when the existing techniques can finish.