Title: Assessing nodes' importance in complex networks using structural holes

Authors: Hui Xu; Jianpei Zhang; Jing Yang; Lijun Lun

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, China; Library, Heilongjiang University of Chinese Medicine, Harbin, 150001, China ' College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China ' College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China ' College of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Harbin Normal University, Harbin, 150025, China

Abstract: Accurate measurement of important nodes in complex networks has great practical and theoretical significance. Mining important nodes should not only consider the core nodes, but also take into account the locations of the nodes in the network. Despite much research on assessing important nodes, the importance of nodes in the structural holes is still easily ignored. Therefore, a local measuring method is proposed, which evaluates the nodes importance by the total constraints caused by the lack of primary structural holes and secondary structural holes around the nodes. This method simultaneously considers both the centrality and the bridging property of the nodes' first-order and second-order neighbours. Further to prove the accuracy of the method TCM, we carry out deliberate attack simulations through selective deletion in a certain proportion of network nodes. Then, we calculate the decreased ratio of network efficiency in the before-and-after attacks. Experiment results show that the average effect of the TCM in four real networks are improved by 50.64% and 14.92% compared to the clustering coefficient index and the k-shell decomposition method, respectively. Obviously, the TCM is more accurate to mine important nodes than other two methods, and it is suitable for quantitative analysis in large-scale networks.

Keywords: complex networks; structural holes; secondary holes; nodes importance; constraints.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2018.094951

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2018 Vol.12 No.3, pp.314 - 323

Received: 23 Jun 2016
Accepted: 02 Sep 2016
Published online: 28 Sep 2018 *

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