Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks based on gravity formula

Ling-ling Ma, Chuang Ma, Hai-Feng Zhang and Bing-Hong Wang

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 451, issue C, 205-212

Abstract: How to identify the influential spreaders in social networks is crucial for accelerating/hindering information diffusion, increasing product exposure, controlling diseases and rumors, and so on. In this paper, by viewing the k-shell value of each node as its mass and the shortest path distance between two nodes as their distance, then inspired by the idea of the gravity formula, we propose a gravity centrality index to identify the influential spreaders in complex networks. The comparison between the gravity centrality index and some well-known centralities, such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and k-shell centrality, and so forth, indicates that our method can effectively identify the influential spreaders in real networks as well as synthetic networks. We also use the classical Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) epidemic model to verify the good performance of our method.

Keywords: Complex networks; Influential spreader; Gravity formula (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:451:y:2016:i:c:p:205-212

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.12.162

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