Impact of snowball sampling ratios on network characteristics estimation: A case study of Cyworld

Today's social networking services have tens of millions of users, and are growing fast. Their sheer size poses a significant challenge in capturing and analyzing their topological characteristics. Snowball sampling is a popular method to crawl and sample network topologies, but requires a high sampling ratio for accurate estimation of certain metrics. In this work, we evaluate how close topo-logical characteristics of snowball sampled networks are to the complete network. Instead of using a synthetically generated topology, we use the complete topology of Cyworld ilchon network. The goal of this work is to determine sampling ratios for accurate estimation of key topological charac-teristics, such as the degree distribution, the degree correlation, the assortativity, and the clustering coefficient.