A Comparative Study of Community Structure Based Node Scores for Network Immunization

摘要

Network immunization has often been conducted by removing nodes with large network centrality so that the whole network can be fragmented into smaller subgraphs. Since contamination (e.g., virus) is propagated among subgraphs (communities) along links in a network, besides centrality, utilization of community structure seems effective for immunization. We have proposed community structure based node scores in terms of a vector representation of nodes in a network. In this paper we report a comparative study of our node scores over both synthetic and real-world networks. The characteristics of the node scores are clarified through the visualization of networks. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare the node scores with other centrality based immunization strategies. The results are encouraging and indicate that the node scores are promising.