Network Analysis Based on Important Node Selection and Community Detection

Abstract

The stability and robustness of a complex network can be significantly improved by determining important nodes and by analyzing their tendency to group into clusters. Several centrality measures for evaluating the importance of a node in a complex network exist in the literature, each one focusing on a different perspective. Community detection algorithms can be used to determine clusters of nodes based on the network structure. This paper shows by empirical means that node importance can be evaluated by a dual perspective—by combining the traditional centrality measures regarding the whole network as one unit, and by analyzing the node clusters yielded by community detection. Not only do these approaches offer overlapping results but also complementary information regarding the top important nodes. To confirm this mechanism, we performed experiments for synthetic and real-world networks and the results indicate the interesting relation between important nodes on community and network level.