Detecting most central actors of an unknown network using friendship paradox

Most central people have more influence on business communication, knowledge diffusion, viral marketing and some other fields over other persons in a social network. Networks for which digital information is available such as email communication, phone call etc., one can easily find central actors using social network analysis tools. But for networks where no such information is available, for example farmers in a remote village, secret networks of a criminal organization etc., finding central actors is challenging. We call such network as unknown network. In this research, we have propose a method based on the idea of friendship paradox (FP) to find the most prominent actors from an unknown network. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our method finds the most centrals by exploring only a small population of an unknown social network with a high accuracy.