Today I read a paper titled “A Parameterized Centrality Metric for Network Analysis”
The abstract is:
A variety of metrics have been proposed to measure the relative importance of nodes in a network
One of these, alpha-centrality [Bonacich, 2001], measures the number of attenuated paths that exist between nodes
We introduce a normalized version of this metric and use it to study network structure, specifically, to rank nodes and find community structure of the network
Specifically, we extend the modularity-maximization method [Newman and Girvan, 2004] for community detection to use this metric as the measure of node connectivity
Normalized alpha-centrality is a powerful tool for network analysis, since it contains a tunable parameter that sets the length scale of interactions
By studying how rankings and discovered communities change when this parameter is varied allows us to identify locally and globally important nodes and structures
We apply the proposed method to several benchmark networks and show that it leads to better insight into network structure than alternative methods