Many popular measures used in social network analysis, including centrality, are based on the random walk. The random walk is a model of a stochastic process where a node interacts with one other node at a time. However, the random walk may not be appropriate for modeling social phenomena, including epidemics and information diffusion, in which one node may interact with many others at the same time, for example, by broadcasting the virus or information to its neighbors. To produce meaningful results, social network analysis algorithms have to take into account the nature of interactions between the nodes. In this paper we classify dynamical processes as conservative and non-conservative and relate them to well-known measures of centrality used in network analysis: PageRank and Alpha-Centrality. We demonstrate, by ranking users in online social networks used for broadcasting information, that non-conservative Alpha-Centrality generally leads to a better agreement with an empirical ranking scheme than the conservative PageRank.
@cite_28 studied measures similar to Alpha-Centrality and personalized PageRank (with attenuation factor 1) which they call communicability. They linked the communicability functions to dynamics by showing their relationship to the thermal Green's function of oscillators. They used communicability to identify important actors in small social networks, demonstrating that different communicability functions led to different judgements of centrality, but did not justify the choice of the particular communicability function in terms of the interactions taking place between actors. Although we study a similar function, the goal of our work is to contrast conservative and non-conservative dynamics and explain how these differences should guide the choice of centrality measure for a given social network.
@cite_28
2950028823 2041757699 2116844604 2127405101
Several centrality measures have been formulated to quantify the notion of 'importance' of actors in social networks. Current measures scrutinize either local or global connectivity of the nodes and have been found to be inadequate for social networks. Ignoring hierarchy and community structure, which are inherent in all human social networks, is the primary cause of this inadequacy. Positional hierarchy and embeddedness of an actor in the community are intuitively crucial determinants of his importance. The theory of social capital asserts that an actor's importance is derived from his position in network hierarchy as well as from the potential to mobilize resources through intra-community (bonding) and inter-community (bridging) ties. Inspired by this idea, we propose a novel centrality measure SC (Social Centrality) for actors in social networks. Our measure accounts for - i) an individual's propensity to socialize, and ii) his connections within and outside the community. These two factors are suitably aggregated to produce social centrality score. Comparative analysis of SC measure with classical and recent centrality measures using large public networks shows that it consistently produces a more realistic ranking of nodes. The inference is based on the available ground truth for each tested networks. Extensive analysis of rankings delivered by SC measure and mapping with known facts in well-studied networks justifies its effectiveness in diverse social networks. Scalability evaluation of SC measure justifies its efficacy for real-world large networks. A complex network can be modeled as a graph representing the ''who knows who'' relationship. In the context of graph theory for social networks, the notion of centrality is used to assess the relative importance of nodes in a given network topology. For example, in a network composed of large dense clusters connected through only a few links, the nodes involved in those links are particularly critical as far as the network survivability is concerned. This may also impact any application running on top of it. Such information can be exploited for various topological maintenance issues to prevent congestion and disruption. This can also be used offline to identify the most important actors in large social interaction graphs. Several forms of centrality have been proposed so far. Yet, they suffer from imperfections: initially designed for small social graphs, they are either of limited use (degree centrality), either incompatible in a distributed setting (e.g. random walk betweenness centrality). In this paper we introduce a novel form of centrality: the second order centrality which can be computed in a distributed manner. This provides locally each node with a value reflecting its relative criticity and relies on a random walk visiting the network in an unbiased fashion. To this end, each node records the time elapsed between visits of that random walk (called return time in the sequel) and computes the standard deviation (or second order moment) of such return times. The key point is that central nodes see regularly the random walk compared to other topology nodes. Both through theoretical analysis and simulation, we show that the standard deviation can be used to accurately identify critical nodes as well as to globally characterize graphs topology in a distributed way. We finally compare our proposal to well-known centralities to assess its competitivity. In recent work, Ozgur, Leveque, and Tse (2007) obtained a complete scaling characterization of throughput scaling for random extended wireless networks (i.e., n nodes are placed uniformly at random in a square region of area n). They showed that for small path-loss exponents alpha isin (2,3], cooperative communication is order optimal, and for large path-loss exponents alpha > 3, multihop communication is order optimal. However, their results (both the communication scheme and the proof technique) are strongly dependent on the regularity induced with high probability by the random node placement. In this paper, we consider the problem of characterizing the throughput scaling in extended wireless networks with arbitrary node placement. As a main result, we propose a more general novel cooperative communication scheme that works for arbitrarily placed nodes. For small path-loss exponents alpha isin (2,3], we show that our scheme is order optimal for all node placements, and achieves exactly the same throughput scaling as in Ozgur. This shows that the regularity of the node placement does not affect the scaling of the achievable rates for alpha isin (2,3]. The situation is, however, markedly different for large path-loss exponents alpha > 3. We show that in this regime the scaling of the achievable per-node rates depends crucially on the regularity of the node placement. We then present a family of schemes that smoothly ldquointerpolaterdquo between multihop and cooperative communication, depending upon the level of regularity in the node placement. We establish order optimality of these schemes under adversarial node placement for alpha > 3. The concept of centrality is often invoked in social network analysis, and diverse indices have been proposed to measure it. This paper develops a unified framework for the measurement of centrality. All measures of centrality assess a node's involvement in the walk structure of a network. Measures vary along four key dimensions: type of nodal involvement assessed, type of walk considered, property of walk assessed, and choice of summary measure. If we cross-classify measures by type of nodal involvement (radial versus medial) and property of walk assessed (volume versus length), we obtain a four-fold polychotomization with one cell empty which mirrors Freeman's 1979 categorization. At a more substantive level, measures of centrality summarize a node's involvement in or contribution to the cohesiveness of the network. Radial measures in particular are reductions of pair-wise proximities cohesion to attributes of nodes or actors. The usefulness and interpretability of radial measures depend on the fit of the cohesion matrix to the one-dimensional model. In network terms, a network that is fit by a one-dimensional model has a core-periphery structure in which all nodes revolve more or less closely around a single core. This in turn implies that the network does not contain distinct cohesive subgroups. Thus, centrality is shown to be intimately connected with the cohesive subgroup structure of a network.