A Spark Parallel Betweenness Centrality Computation and its Application to Community Detection Problems

The Brandes algorithm has the lowest computational complexity for computing the betweenness centrality measures of all nodes or edges in a given graph. Its numerous applications make it one of the most used algorithms in social network analysis. In this work, we provide a parallel version of the algorithm implemented in Spark. The experimental results show that the parallel algorithm scales as the number of cores increases. Finally, we provide a version of the well-known community detection Girvan-Newman algorithm, based on the Spark version of Brandes algorithm.