Characterizing Directed and Undirected Networks via Multidimensional Walks with Jumps

Estimating distributions of node characteristics (labels) such as number of connections or citizenship of users in a social network via edge and node sampling is a vital part of the study of complex networks. Due to its low cost, sampling via a random walk (RW) has been proposed as an attractive solution to this task. Most RW methods assume either that the network is undirected or that walkers can traverse edges regardless of their direction. Some RW methods have been designed for directed networks where edges coming into a node are not directly observable. In this work, we propose Directed Unbiased Frontier Sampling (DUFS), a sampling method based on a large number of coordinated walkers, each starting from a node chosen uniformly at random. It is applicable to directed networks with invisible incoming edges because it constructs, in real-time, an undirected graph consistent with the walkers trajectories, and due to the use of random jumps which prevent walkers from being trapped. DUFS generalizes previous RW methods and is suited for undirected networks and to directed networks regardless of in-edges visibility. We also propose an improved estimator of node label distributions that combines information from the initial walker locations with subsequent RW observations. We evaluate DUFS, compare it to other RW methods, investigate the impact of its parameters on estimation accuracy and provide practical guidelines for choosing them. In estimating out-degree distributions, DUFS yields significantly better estimates of the head of the distribution than other methods, while matching or exceeding estimation accuracy of the tail. Last, we show that DUFS outperforms uniform node sampling when estimating distributions of node labels of the top 10% largest degree nodes, even when sampling a node uniformly has the same cost as RW steps.