QRE: Quick Robustness Estimation for large complex networks

Robustness estimation is critical for the design and maintenance of resilient networks. Existing studies on network robustness usually exploit a single network metric to generate attack strategies, which simulate intentional attacks on a network, and compute a metric-induced robustness estimation, called R. While some metrics are easy to compute, e.g. degree, others require considerable computation efforts, e.g. betweenness centrality. We propose Quick Robustness Estimation (QRE), a new framework and implementation for estimating the robustness of a network in sub-quadratic time, i.e., significantly faster than betweenness centrality, based on the combination of cheap-to-compute network metrics. Experiments on twelve real-world networks show that QRE estimates the robustness better than betweenness centrality-based computation, while being at least one order of magnitude faster for larger networks. Our work contributes towards scalable, yet accurate robustness estimation for large complex networks.