System, method, and service for finding an optimal collection of paths among a plurality of paths between two nodes in a complex network

摘要

An optimal path selection system extracts a connection subgraph in real time from an undirected, edge-weighted graph such as a social network that best captures the connections between two nodes of the graph. The system models the undirected, edge-weighted graph as an electrical circuit and solves for a relationship between two nodes in the undirected edge-weighted graph based on electrical analogues in the electric graph model. The system optionally accelerates the computations to produce approximate, high-quality connection subgraphs in real time on very large (disk resident) graphs. The connection subgraph is constrained to the integer budget that comprises a first node, a second node and a collection of paths from the first node to the second node that maximizes a "goodness" function g(H). The goodness function g(H) is tailored to capture salient aspects of a relationship between the first node and the second node.