A MapReduce-Based Approach for Fast Connected Components Detection from Large-Scale Networks

Owing to increasing size of the real-world networks, their processing using classical techniques has become infeasible. The amount of storage and central processing unit time required for processing large networks is far beyond the capabilities of a high-end computing machine. Moreover, real-world network data are generally distributed in nature because they are collected and stored on distributed platforms. This has popularized the use of the MapReduce, a distributed data processing framework, for analyzing real-world network data. Existing MapReduce-based methods for connected components detection mainly struggle to minimize the number of MapReduce rounds and the amount of data generated and forwarded to the subsequent rounds. This article presents an efficient MapReduce-based approach for finding connected components, which does not forward the complete set of connected components to the subsequent rounds; instead, it writes them to the Hadoop Distributed File System as soon as they are found to reduce the amount of data forwarded to the subsequent rounds. It also presents an application of the proposed method in contact tracing. The proposed method is evaluated on several network data sets and compared with two state-of-the-art methods. The empirical results reveal that the proposed method performs significantly better and is scalable to find connected components in large-scale networks.