Node Importance Ranking in Complex Networks Based on Multicriteria Decision Making

Abstract

Measuring node importance in complex networks has great theoretical and practical significance for network stability and robustness. A variety of network centrality criteria have been presented to address this problem, but each of them focuses only on certain aspects and results in loss of information. Therefore, this paper proposes a relatively comprehensive and effective method to evaluate node importance in complex networks using a multicriteria decision-making method. This method not only takes into account degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality, but also uses an entropy weighting method to calculate the weight of each criterion, which can overcome the influence of the subjective factor. To illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method, four experiments were conducted to rank node importance on four real networks. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can rank node importance more comprehensively and accurately than a single centrality criterion.