Identifying influential nodes in a network is a fundamental issue due to its wide applications, such as accelerating information diffusion or halting virus spreading. Many measures based on the network topology have emerged over the years to identify influential nodes such as Betweenness, Closeness, and Eigenvalue centrality. However, although most real-world networks are modular, few measures exploit this property. Recent works have shown that it has a significant effect on the dynamics on networks. In a modular network, a node has two types of influence: a local influence (on the nodes of its community) through its intra-community links and a global influence (on the nodes in other communities) through its inter-community links. Depending of the strength of the community structure, these two components are more or less influential. Based on this idea, we propose to extend all the standard centrality measures defined for networks with no community structure to modular networks. The so-called "Modular centrality" is a two dimensional vector. Its first component quantifies the local influence of a node in its community while the second component quantifies its global influence on the other communities of the network. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the Modular centrality extensions, comparison with their scalar counterpart are performed in an epidemic process setting. Simulation results using the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model on synthetic networks with controlled community structure allows getting a clear idea about the relation between the strength of the community structure and the major type of influence (global local). Furthermore, experiments on real-world networks demonstrate the merit of this approach.
Ranking the nodes according to their centrality constitutes the standard deterministic approach to uncover the most influential nodes in a network. These measures rely usually on various network topological properties. However, the community structure of the network is rarely taken into consideration. Few researchers have payed attention to this property encountered in many real-world networks @cite_9 @cite_12 @cite_28 @cite_25 @cite_22 @cite_3 @cite_14 @cite_23 @cite_19 @cite_18 @cite_2 . In this section, we give a brief overview of the main deterministic methods that motivates our proposition.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_3 @cite_19 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_25 @cite_12
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Understanding the network structure, and finding out the influential nodes is a challenging issue in large networks. Identifying the most influential nodes in a network can be useful in many applications like immunization of nodes in case of epidemic spreading, during intentional attacks on complex networks. A lot of research is being done to devise centrality measures which could efficiently identify the most influential nodes in a network. There are two major approaches to this problem: On one hand, deterministic strategies that exploit knowledge about the overall network topology, while on the other end, random strategies are completely agnostic about the network structure. Centrality measures that can deal with a limited knowledge of the network structure are of prime importance. Indeed, in practice, information about the global structure of the overall network is rarely available or hard to acquire. Even if available, the structure of the network might be too large that it is too much computationally expensive to calculate global centrality measures. To that end, a centrality measure is proposed here that requires information only at the community level. Indeed, most of the real-world networks exhibit a community structure that can be exploited efficiently to discover the influential nodes. We performed a comparative evaluation of prominent global deterministic strategies together with stochastic strategies, an available and the proposed deterministic community-based strategy. Effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by performing experiments on synthetic and real-world networks with community structure in the case of immunization of nodes for epidemic control. In this paper we present a novel strategy to discover the community structure of (possibly, large) networks. This approach is based on the well-know concept of network modularity optimization. To do so, our algorithm exploits a novel measure of edge centrality, based on the κ-paths. This technique allows to efficiently compute a edge ranking in large networks in near linear time. Once the centrality ranking is calculated, the algorithm computes the pairwise proximity between nodes of the network. Finally, it discovers the community structure adopting a strategy inspired by the well-known state-of-the-art Louvain method (henceforth, LM), efficiently maximizing the network modularity. The experiments we carried out show that our algorithm outperforms other techniques and slightly improves results of the original LM, providing reliable results. Another advantage is that its adoption is naturally extended even to unweighted networks, differently with respect to the LM. Measuring the centrality of nodes in real-world networks has remained an important task in the technological, social, and biological network paradigms carrying implications on their analysis and applications. Exact inference of centrality values is infeasible in large networks due to the need to solve the all-pairs shortest path problem. We introduce a framework to approximate node centralities in real-world networks that are known to exhibit modularity, i.e., the presence of dense subgraphs or communities, which are themselves sparsely connected. We also propose a novel centrality measure known as Community Inbetweenness that ranks nodes based solely on community information. In a modular network of size n with √n(1 2) evenly sized communities and m edges, our framework requires linear time O(m) and O(√nm) time for the approximation of closeness and betweenness respectively. Utilizing a recently proposed linear time method in community detection, our approximation techniques are faster than traditional sampling algorithms, applicable in real-time distributed environments, and offer highly comparable results. Identifying influential nodes that lead to faster and wider spreading in complex networks is of theoretical and practical significance. The degree centrality method is very simple but of little relevance. Global metrics such as betweenness centrality and closeness centrality can better identify influential nodes, but are incapable to be applied in large-scale networks due to the computational complexity. In order to design an effective ranking method, we proposed a semi-local centrality measure as a tradeoff between the low-relevant degree centrality and other time-consuming measures. We use the Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) model to evaluate the performance by using the spreading rate and the number of infected nodes. Simulations on four real networks show that our method can well identify influential nodes.