On Scalable Computation of Graph Eccentricities

Given a graph, eccentricity measures the distance from each node to its farthest node. Eccentricity indicates the centrality of each node and collectively encodes fundamental graph properties: the radius and the diameter --- the minimum and maximum eccentricity, respectively, over all the nodes in the graph. Computing the eccentricities for all the graph nodes, however, is challenging in theory: any approach shall either complete in quadratic time or introduce a 1/3 relative error under certain hypotheses. In practice, the state-of-the-art approach PLLECC in computing exact eccentricities relies heavily on a precomputed all-pair-shortest-distance index whose expensive construction refrains PLLECC from scaling up. This paper provides insights to enable scalable exact eccentricity computation that does not rely on any index. The proposed algorithm IFECC handles billion-scale graphs that no existing approach can process and achieves up to two orders of magnitude speedup over PLLECC. As a by-product, IFECC can be terminated at any time during execution to produce approximate eccentricities, which is empirically more stable and reliable than KBFS, the state-of-the-art algorithm for approximately computing eccentricities.