ABSTRACTComputing betweenness centrality (BC) in large graphs is crucial for various applications, including telecommunications, social, and biological networks. However, the huge size of the data presents significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce a novel approximate approach for efficiently extracting top k BC nodes by combining the Louvain community detection algorithm with Brandes' algorithm. Our method significantly enhances the runtime efficiency of the traditional Brandes' algorithm while preserving accuracy across both synthetic and real‐world datasets. Additionally, our approach is suitable for parallelization, further improving its efficiency. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our method for large and sparse graphs.