Betweenness in time dependent networks

The concept of betweenness has given rise to a very useful class of network centrality measures. Loosely, betweenness quantifies the level of importance of a node in terms of its propensity to act as an intermediary when messages are passed around the network. In this work we generalize a walk-based betweenness measure to the case of time-dependent networks, such as those arising in telecommunications and on-line social media. We also introduce a new kind of betweenness measure, temporal betweenness, which quantifies the importance of a time-point. We illustrate the effectiveness of these new measures on synthetic examples, and also give results on real data sets involving voice call, email and Twitter.