Fast asynchronous updating algorithms for k-shell indices

Identifying influential nodes in networks is a significant and challenging task. Among many centrality indices, the k-shell index performs very well in finding out influential spreaders. However, the traditional method for calculating the k-shell indices of nodes needs the global topological information, which limits its applications in large-scale dynamically growing networks. Recently, Lü et al. [Nature Commun. 7 (2016) 10168] proposed a novel asynchronous algorithm to calculate the k-shell indices, which is suitable to deal with large-scale growing networks. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to select nodes and update their intermediate values towards the k-shell indices, which can help in accelerating the convergence of the calculation of k-shell indices. The former algorithm takes into account the degrees of nodes while the latter algorithm prefers to choose the node whose neighbors' values have been changed recently. We test these two methods on four real networks and four artificial networks. The results suggest that the two algorithms can respectively reduce the convergence time up to 75.4% and 92.9% in average, compared with the original asynchronous updating algorithm.