Identifying key spreaders in complex networks based on local clustering coefficient and structural hole information

Abstract

Identifying key spreaders in a network is one of the fundamental problems in the field of complex network research, and accurately identifying influential propagators in a network holds significant practical implications. In recent years, numerous effective methods have been proposed and widely applied. However, many of these methods still have certain limitations. For instance, some methods rely solely on the global position information of nodes to assess their propagation influence, disregarding local node information. Additionally, certain methods do not consider clustering coefficients, which are essential attributes of nodes. Inspired by the quality formula, this paper introduces a method called Structural Neighborhood Centrality (SNC) that takes into account the neighborhood information of nodes. SNC measures the propagation power of nodes based on first and second-order neighborhood degrees, local clustering coefficients, structural hole constraints, and other information, resulting in higher accuracy. A series of pertinent experiments conducted on 12 real-world datasets demonstrate that, in terms of accuracy, SNC outperforms methods like CycleRatio and KSGC. Additionally, SNC demonstrates heightened monotonicity, enabling it to distinguish subtle differences between nodes. Furthermore, when it comes to identifying the most influential Top-k nodes, SNC also displays superior capabilities compared to the aforementioned methods. Finally, we conduct a detailed analysis of SNC and discuss its advantages and limitations.

Keywords

• complex network
• clustering coefficient
• structural hole
• key spreader