Alpha current flow betweenness centrality

Abstract

A class of centrality measures called betweenness centralities reflects degree of participation of edges or nodes in communication between different parts of the network. The original shortest-path betweenness centrality is based on counting shortest paths which go through a node or an edge. One of shortcomings of the shortest-path betweenness centrality is that it ignores the paths that might be one or two hops longer than the shortest paths, while the edges on such paths can be important for communication processes in the network. To rectify this shortcoming a current flow betweenness centrality has been proposed. Similarly to the shortest-path betweenness, it has prohibitive complexity for large size networks. In the present work we propose two regularizations of the current flow betweenness centrality, α-current flow betweenness and truncated α-current flow betweenness, which can be computed fast and correlate well with the original current flow betweenness. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.