Combined centrality measures for an improved characterization of influence spread in social networks

Influence Maximization (IM) aims at finding the most influential users in a social network, that is, users who maximize the spread of an opinion within a certain propagation model. Previous work investigated the correlation between influence spread and nodal centrality measures to bypass more expensive IM simulations. The results were promising but incomplete, since these studies investigated the performance (i.e. the ability to identify influential users) of centrality measures only in restricted settings, for example, in undirected/unweighted networks and/or within a propagation model less common for IM. In this article, we first show that good results within the Susceptible-Infected-Removed propagation model for unweighted and undirected networks do not necessarily transfer to directed or weighted networks under the popular Independent Cascade (IC) propagation model. Then, we identify a set of centrality measures with good performance for weighted and directed networks within the IC model. Our main contribution is a new way to combine the centrality measures in a closed formula to yield even better results. Additionally, we also extend gravitational centrality (GC) with the proposed combined centrality measures. Our experiments on 50 real-world data sets show that our proposed centrality measures outperform well-known centrality measures and the state-of-the art GC measure significantly.