Influential Spreaders Identification by Fusing Network Topology

Abstract

With the development of network science, complex network analysis has received extensive attention. In recent years, influential spreaders identification has become a hot topic in the research of complex networks. In general, influential spreader identification algorithms are mainly divided into centrality-based algorithms and topology-based algorithms. However, centrality-based algorithms have to face the information limitation problem that leads to low accuracy for identifying influential spreaders. Topology-based algorithms have both structural and positional limitation problems that lead to low accuracy for identifying peripheral influential spreaders. In this paper, we focus on improving the situation and propose two influential spreader identification algorithms, NSC (neighborhood structure centrality) and NPC (neighborhood position centrality) from both the perspective of the centrality and the network topology. NSC algorithm collects various types of network structure information through structure embedding and clustering, so as to solve missing network structure information problem. NPC algorithm calculates neighborhood location information by improving the k-shell algorithm to tackle location limitation problem. Experimental results with fourteen baseline algorithms show that our proposed algorithms NSC and NPC can achieve higher accuracy.