A new centrality measure of nodes in multilayer networks under the framework of tensor computation

One challenging issue in information science, biological systems and many other field is to determine the most central agents in multilayer networked systems characterized by different types of interrelationships. In this paper, using a fourth-order tensor to represent multilayer networks, we propose a new centrality measure, referred to as the Singular Vector of Tensor (SVT) centrality, which is used to quantitatively evaluate the importance of nodes connected by different types of links in multilayer networks. First, we present a novel iterative method to obtain four alternative metrics that can quantify the hub and authority scores of nodes and layers in multilayer networked systems. Moreover, we use the theory of multilinear algebra to prove that the four metrics converge to four singular vectors of the adjacency tensor of the multilayer network under reasonable conditions. Furthermore, a novel SVT centrality measure is obtained by integrating these four metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is a new centrality measure that significantly outperforms six other published centrality methods on two real-world multilayer networks related to complex diseases, i.e., gastric and colon cancers.