Investigating Centrality Measures in Social Networks with Community Structure

Abstract

Centrality measures are crucial in quantifying the influence of the members of a social network. Although there has been a great deal of work dealing with this issue, the vast majority of classical centrality measures are agnostic of the community structure characterizing many social networks. Recent works have developed community-aware centrality measures that exploit features of the community structure information encountered in most real-world complex networks. In this paper, we investigate the interactions between 5 popular classical centrality measures and 5 community-aware centrality measures using 8 real-world online networks. Correlation as well as similarity measures between both type of centrality measures are computed. Results show that community-aware centrality measures can be divided into two groups. The first group, which includes Bridging centrality, Community Hub-Bridge and Participation Coefficient, provides distinctive node information as compared to classical centrality. This behavior is consistent across the networks. The second group which includes Community-based Mediator and Number of Neighboring Communities is characterized by more mixed results that vary across networks.

Research on the Statistical Properties and Stability of Complex Interindustrial Networks

“…Te relevance of these measures in diferent network contexts, as discussed by Grando et al [37], underscores their utility in identifying infuential nodes and assessing network resilience. Furthermore, the study by Rajeh et al [38] highlights the importance of considering community structures in centrality analysis, which can be particularly pertinent in complex industrial networks. Te correlation analysis of centrality measures by Ficara et al [39] provides a comprehensive understanding of how these diferent centrality types interact and infuence each other, enriching the analysis of network stability in this research.…”

Comparative evaluation of community-aware centrality measures

“…Even though various community-aware centrality measures have been developed [8,10,11,19,20,30,40,45], the literature reports few comparative studies. Authors generally introduce a new community-aware centrality measure and compare it with a few alternatives.…”

How Correlated are Community-aware and Classical Centrality Measures in Complex Networks?

“…Many studies are devoted to the interactions between classical centrality measures [8,12,16,18,20]. However, the relationship between classical and community-aware centrality measures is almost unexplored [17]. Our goal in this paper is to gain a better understanding of this issue.…”