Identifying a set of influential spreaders in complex networks.
Identifying a set of influential spreaders in complex networks plays a crucial role in effective information spreading. A simple strategy is to choose top-r ranked nodes as spreaders according to influence ranking method such as PageRank, ClusterRank and k-shell decomposition. Besides, some heuristic methods such as hill-climbing, SPIN, degree discount and independent set based are also proposed. However, these approaches suffer from a possibility that some spreaders are so close together that they overlap sphere of influence or time consuming. In this report, we present a simply yet effectively iterative method named VoteRank to identify a set of decentralized spreaders with the best spreading ability. In this approach, all nodes vote in a spreader in each turn, and the voting ability of neighbors of elected spreader will be decreased in subsequent turn. Experimental results on four real networks show that under Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) and Susceptible-Infected (SI) models, VoteRank outperforms the traditional benchmark methods on both spreading rate and final affected scale. What's more, VoteRank has superior computational efficiency.
Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.|Big Data Research Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.
Jian-Xiong
JX
Zhang
Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.|Big Data Research Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.
Duan-Bing
DB
Chen
Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.|Big Data Research Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.
Qiang
Q
Dong
Big Data Research Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, P.R. China.
Zhi-Dan
ZD
Zhao