Centrality Measures in Directed Fuzzy Social Networks

Abstract

The centrality of actors has been a key issue in undirected fuzzy social network (UFSN) analysis. For undirected fuzzy social networks (UFSNs) where edges are just a present or absent undirected fuzzy relation with no more information attached. There has been a growing need to design centrality measures for directed fuzzy social networks (DFSNs), because DFSNs where edges are attached with directed fuzzy relation would contain rich information. In this paper, we propose some new centrality measure called fuzzy in-degree centrality, fuzzy out-degree centrality, fuzzy in-closeness centrality and fuzzy out-closeness centrality which are applicable to the DFSNs. It unveils more structural information about directed fuzzy relation and connectivity of DFSNs. Furthermore, by investigating the validness and robustness of this new centrality measure by illustrating this method to some cases and we obtain reliable results, which provide strong evidences of the new measures’ utility.

Keywords

• Directed fuzzy relation
• Directed fuzzy social network
• Fuzzy in-degree centrality
• Fuzzy in-closeness centrality