Node Conductance: A Scalable Node Centrality Measure on Big Networks

Abstract

Node centralities such as Degree and Betweenness help detecting influential nodes from local or global view. Existing global centrality measures suffer from the high computational complexity and unrealistic assumptions, limiting their applications on real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a new centrality measure, Node Conductance, to effectively detect spanning structural hole nodes and predict the formation of new edges. Node Conductance is the sum of the probability that node i is revisited at r-th step, where r is an integer between 1 and infinity. Moreover, with the help of node embedding techniques, Node Conductance is able to be approximately calculated on big networks effectively and efficiently. Thorough experiments present the differences between existing centralities and Node Conductance, its outstanding ability of detecting influential nodes on both static and dynamic network, and its superior efficiency compared with other global centralities.