A novel measurement of structure properties in complex networks

Abstract

Traditional measurements provide an effective tool to study the complex large systems in the real world. These global quantities only analyze the general statistical properties and interconnectivity structure of the entire network. However the complicated interactions among the locals are indeed the origin to emergent complex behavior. So in this paper we present a new measurement to reveal the local structure properties - topology potential, which reflects the differential position of each node in the topology. It is flexible by adjusting the influence factor. We demonstrate our measurement in US politics books network. Experiments confirm that topology potential has inherently implied the traditional measurements to some extent. © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.