The Role of Network Topology on Community-aware Centrality Measures

Stephany Rajeh

April 4th, 2022, 11am
Room : 24-25/405

While there is a great deal of work on designing centrality measures, the mainstream does not exploit the network’s community structure. Nevertheless, communities are pervasive in many real-world networks. A community is generally apprehended as a group of nodes densely connected between each other and sparsely connected with other nodes. As communities play a significant role in understanding how nodes behave in networks, a research area concerned with the relation between community structure and the importance of nodes has recently emerged in network science. These works have shown that incorporating community structure information allows designing more effective centrality measures. We refer to them as “community-aware” centrality measures. In this talk, we shed light on how classical (i.e., community-agnostic) centrality measures relate to community-aware centrality measures given a network’s macroscopic and mesoscopic topology. Then, we show the subtility of using these measures in different dynamic models, namely the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model and the Linear Threshold (LT) model. Additionally, as there are plenty of works to detect overlapping communities, few scientists make use of the overlapping community structure to identify critical nodes. Indeed, nodes may belong to several communities in many situations, indicating an overlapping community structure. We propose a framework to target influential nodes in networks with an overlapping community structure inspired by the concept of vitality. Finally, ascribable to the significance of communities in real-world networks, we present a backbone extraction method that maintains the network’s modularity while essentially reducing its  original size.