A new method to identify influential nodes based on combining of existing centrality measures

摘要

How to identify influential nodes in complex networks continues to be an open issue. A number of centrality measures have been presented to address this problem. However, these studies focus only on a centrality measure and each centrality measure has its own shortcomings and limitations. To solve the above problems, in this paper, a novel method is proposed to identify influential nodes based on combining of the existing centrality measures. Because information flow spreads in different ways in different networks, in the specific network, the appropriate centrality measures should be selected to calculate the ranking of nodes. Then, an interval can be generated for the ranking of each node, which includes the upper limit and lower limit obtained from different centrality measures. Next, the final ranking of each node can be determined based on the median of the interval. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, four experiments are conducted to identify vital nodes simulations on four real networks, and the superiority of the method can be demonstrated by the results of comparison experiments.