Improving detection of influential nodes in complex networks

•The goal is to identify the most influential nodes in complex networks.•We propose DegreeDistance and improve it in two phases, FIDD and SIDD.•We take into account distance of seeds as well as the influence score.•We investigate the rate of unique nodes influenced by our methods.•The SIDD outperforms other measures by choosing a more appropriate seed set.

Recently an increasing amount of research is devoted to the question of how the most influential nodes (seeds) can be found effectively in a complex network. There are a number of measures proposed for this purpose, for instance, high-degree centrality measure reflects the importance of the network topology and has a reasonable runtime performance to find a set of nodes with highest degree, but they do not have a satisfactory dissemination potentiality in the network due to having many common neighbors (CN(1)) and common neighbors of neighbors (CN(2)). This flaw holds in other measures as well. In this paper, we compare high-degree centrality measure with other well-known measures using ten datasets in order to find a proportion for the common seeds in the seed sets obtained by them. We, thereof, propose an improved high-degree centrality measure (named DegreeDistance) and improve it to enhance accuracy in two phases, FIDD and SIDD, by put a threshold on the number of common neighbors of already-selected seed nodes and a non-seed node which is under investigation to be selected as a seed as well as considering the influence score of seed nodes directly or through their common neighbors over the non-seed node. To evaluate the accuracy and runtime performance of DegreeDistance, FIDD, and SIDD, they are applied to eight large-scale networks and it finally turns out that SIDD dramatically outperforms other well-known measures and evinces comparatively more accurate performance in identifying the most influential nodes.