A new approach for node centrality evaluation based on residual network performance measurement

Abstract

The identification of the most influential nodes has been a vibrant subject in complex network research, with many applications across informational, social or biological networks. Despite substantial empirical studies, there is still some defect in the traditional approach for evaluating nodes centralities. The traditional approach for evaluating nodes centralities is to measure network performance change before and after a node fails. To be compatible with this approach, network performance measurement indexes should be monotonic and adequate, which is a constraint condition too strong to satisfy. As a result, many indexes were actually abused in some topologies of networks and the ranking result of nodes centralities may be unreasonable in some application scenarios. To solve the problem, the fundamental rationale of this approach is studied as well as its theoretical defect. Then, a new approach is proposed for evaluating node centrality based on measurement of residual network performance after a node fails. Furthermore, a new index called comprehensive distance is presented for measuring network interconnectedness whether cascading failure is considered or not, which is suitable for not only connected networks but also unconnected networks.Finally, some cases are used to test the validity of the proposed approach. By comparison, the ranking results of nodes centralities evaluated by the proposed approach are more accurate than the results evaluated by the traditional approach. The study about how to measure performance of residual network not only advances the field in terms of node centrality evaluation but also promotes the state of the art in recent related fields such as neural network research and application.

The Identification of Key Nodes in Aviation Networks

“…As a result, few indexes can measure various topologies of networks effectively. In the research [5] , node importance is measured by the comprehensive length of the remaining network. The comprehensive length is a new index, in which the infinite distance between an unconnected node pair is represented by the network size.…”

Integrated method for node centrality evaluation in green networks

“…In many complex networks such as communication networks not only care about the scale of cascading failure, but also care about the ability of the remaining network to continue to run. After cascading failure, the remaining network may be unconnected 10 , which may consist of some subgraphs or isolated nodes. The traffic can flow from a node to another node within the subgraph, while it cannot flow between two subgraphs and the isolated nodes do not have the ability to send and receive traffic.…”