Constructions of betweenness-uniform graphs from trees

Abstract

Betweenness centrality is a measure of the importance of a vertex x inside a network based on the fraction of shortest paths passing through x. We study a blow-up construction that has been shown to produce graphs with uniform distribution of betweenness. We disprove the conjecture about this procedure's universality by showing that trees with a diameter at least three cannot be transformed into betweenness-uniform by the blow-up construction. It remains open to characterize graphs for which the blow-up construction can produce betweenness-uniform graphs.