title: Role of structural holes in containing spreading processes.
abstract: Structural holes are channels or paths spanned by a group of indirectly connected nodes and their intermediary in a network. In this work we emphasize the interesting role of structural holes as brokers for information propagation. Based on the distribution of the structural hole numbers associated with each node, we propose a simple yet effective approach for choosing the most influential nodes to immunize in containing the spreading processes. Using a wide spectrum of large real-world networks, we demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms conventional methods in a remarkable way. In particular, we find that the performance gains of our approach are particularly prominent for networks with high transitivity and assortativity, which verifies the vital role of structural holes in information diffusion on networked systems.
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems, School of Computer Science, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu 610500, China.
authors.forename: Ping
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems, School of Computer Science, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu 610500, China.
authors.forename: Xian
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: NEC Laboratories America, Inc., 4 Independence Way, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Center for Computational Systems Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam 14415, Germany and Institute of Physics, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin 12489, Germany.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kurths