A Network Sampling Strategy Inspired by Epidemic Spreading

Nowadays, network sampling has become an indispensable premise and foundation for large-scale network analysis, and its effectiveness determines to a large extent the reliability and practicability of the subsequent network analysis results. In this paper, we propose a network sampling algorithm inspired by an epidemic spreading model named the contact process. The contact process is similar to the random walk process but different from it in two key points. First, at each time step, a randomly selected sampled node rather than the latest sampled node is responsible for recruiting a new node from its neighborhood. Second, the responsible node recruits one of its neighbor nodes with a probability inversely proportional to the degree of this neighbor node, instead of equal probability. Experiments on nine indiscriminately selected real-world networks show that our proposed sampling algorithm has a significant advantage in preserving two basic network properties, the degree distributions and clustering coefficient distributions of original networks, compared with seven classical sampling methods.