An in-depth study on key nodes in social networks

Abstract

In social network analysis, identifying the important nodes (key nodes) is a significant task in various applications. There are three most popular related tasks named influential node ranking, influence maximization, and network dismantling. Although these studies are different due to their own motivation, they share many similarities, which could confuse the non-domain readers and users. Moreover, few studies have explored the correlations between key nodes obtained from different tasks, hindering our further understanding of social networks. In this paper, we contribute to the field by conducting an in-depth survey of different kinds of key nodes through comparing these key nodes under our proposed framework and revealing their deep relationships. First, we clarify and formalize three existing popular studies under a uniform standard. Then we collect a group of crucial metrics and propose a fair comparison framework to analyze the features of key nodes identified by different research fields. From a large number of experiments and deep analysis on twenty real-world datasets, we not only explore correlations between key nodes derived from the three popular tasks, but also summarize insightful conclusions that explain how key nodes differ from each other and reveal their unique features for the corresponding tasks. Furthermore, we show that Shapley centrality could identify key nodes with more generality, and these nodes could also be applied to the three popular tasks simultaneously to a certain extent.