Identifying Influential Nodes in Complex Networks Based on Local Neighbor Contribution

Abstract

The identification of influential nodes in complex networks has been widely used to suppress rumor dissemination and control the spread of epidemics and diseases. However, achieving high accuracy and comprehensiveness in node influence ranking is time-consuming, and there are issues in using different measures on the same subject. The identification of influential nodes is very important for the maintenance of the entire network because they determine the stability and integrity of the entire network, which has strong practical application value in real life. Accordingly, a method based on local neighbor contribution (LNC) is proposed. LNC combines the influence of the nodes themselves with the contribution of the nearest and the next nearest neighbor nodes, thus further quantifying node influence in complex networks. LNC is applicable to networks of various scales, and its time complexity is considerably low. We evaluate the performance of LNC through extensive simulation experiments on seven real-world networks and two synthetic networks. We employ the SIR model to examine the spreading efficiency of each node and compare LNC with degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, PageRank, Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search(HITS), ProfitLeader, Gravity and Weighted Formal Concept Analysis(WFCA). It is demonstrated that LNC ranks nodes effectively and outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Keywords

• Complex networks
• influential nodes
• local structure
• neighbor contribution