Ranking the spreading ability of nodes in complex networks based on local structure

• The structure of the neighbors of a node can affect its spreading ability.
• A local structural centrality method for ranking node’s spreading ability is proposed.
• The proposed method considers both the number and structure of node’s neighbors.
• The proposed method outperforms other measures on both real and artificial networks.
• The proposed method is robust to different network sizes and community structure.

Ranking nodes by their spreading ability in complex networks is a fundamental problem which relates to wide applications. Local metric like degree centrality is simple but less effective. Global metrics such as betweenness and closeness centrality perform well in ranking nodes, but are of high computational complexity. Recently, to rank nodes effectively and efficiently, a semi-local centrality measure has been proposed as a tradeoff between local and global metrics. However, in semi-local centrality, only the number of the nearest and the next nearest neighbors of a node is taken into account, while the topological connections among the neighbors are neglected. In this paper, we propose a local structural centrality measure which considers both the number and the topological connections of the neighbors of a node. To evaluate the performance of our method, we use the Susceptible–Infected–Recovered   (SIR) model to simulate the epidemic spreading process on both artificial and real networks. By measuring the rank correlation between the ranked list generated by simulation results and the ones generated by centrality measures, we show that our method can rank the spreading ability of nodes more accurately than centrality measures such as degree, kk-shell, betweenness, closeness and local centrality. Further, we show that our method can better distinguish the spreading ability of nodes.