Path diversity improves the identification of influential spreaders

DB Chen, R Xiao, A Zeng, YC Zhang - Europhysics letters, 2014 - iopscience.iop.org
Europhysics letters, 2014iopscience.iop.org
Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks is a crucial problem which relates to
wide applications. Many methods based on the global information such as K-shell and
PageRank have been applied to rank spreaders. However, most of the related previous
works overwhelmingly focus on the number of paths for propagation, while whether the
paths are diverse enough is usually overlooked. Generally, the spreading ability of a node
might not be strong if its propagation depends on one or two paths while the other paths are …
Abstract
Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks is a crucial problem which relates to wide applications. Many methods based on the global information such as K-shell and PageRank have been applied to rank spreaders. However, most of the related previous works overwhelmingly focus on the number of paths for propagation, while whether the paths are diverse enough is usually overlooked. Generally, the spreading ability of a node might not be strong if its propagation depends on one or two paths while the other paths are dead ends. In this letter, we introduced the concept of path diversity and find that it can largely improve the ranking accuracy. We further propose a local method combining the information of path number and path diversity to identify influential nodes in complex networks. This method is shown to outperform many well-known methods in both undirected and directed networks. Moreover, the efficiency of our method makes it possible to apply it to very large systems.
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