Recently, researchers have paid attention to many types of huge networks such as the Internet of Things, sensor networks, social networks, and traffic networks because of their untapped potential for theoretical and practical outcomes. A major obstacle in studying large-scale networks is that their size tends to increase exponentially. In addition, access to large network databases is limited for security or physical connection reasons. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling method that works effectively for large-scale networks. The proposed approach makes multiple heterogeneous Markov chains by adjusting random-walk traits on the given network to explore the target space efficiently. This approach provides better unbiased sampling results with reduced asymptotic variance within reasonable execution time than previous random-walk-based sampling approaches. We perform various experiments on large networks databases obtained from synthesis to real-world applications. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing network sampling methods.
Keywords: Network (Graph) Sampling Methods; Network (Graph) Theory; big data; data privacy; internet of things; large-scale network; sensor networks; social network services.