Finding key actors on social movement networks through improved k-shell method

Abstract

In the age full of conflicts and contradictions, the frequency of social movements has increased. Finding keys actors in social movement networks is a very important task to protect the social stability and ensure citizen security. The structural organization of the social movement is a key factor of the problem. In this paper, by taking into account both the global attributes and local attributes of the nodes, we present an improved k-shell method to calculate the raking value of the nodes. To verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, three representative real social movement networks are introduced into this paper, which include The Milan environmental alliance network, Communication network of striking employees, 911 terrorist hijackers' network neighborhood. Comparing with the reality of the three representative real social movements, the proposed method could find key actors more accurately then ones generated by degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, k-shell value methods. At the same time, the proposed method has less time complexity O(n <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ). This work would be helpful for intelligence analysis of social movements. Furthermore, it has the potential to be extended to large-scale social movement networks.