Node Importance Ranking of Complex Networks with Entropy Variation

The heterogeneous nature of a complex network determines the roles of each node in the network that are quite different. Mechanisms of complex networks such as spreading dynamics, cascading reactions, and network synchronization are highly affected by a tiny fraction of so-called important nodes. Node importance ranking is thus of great theoretical and practical significance. Network entropy is usually utilized to characterize the amount of information encoded in the network structure and to measure the structural complexity at the graph level. We find that entropy can also serve as a local level metric to quantify node importance. We propose an entropic metric, Entropy Variation, defining the node importance as the variation of network entropy before and after its removal, according to the assumption that the removal of a more important node is likely to cause more structural variation. Like other state-of-the-art methods for ranking node importance, the proposed entropic metric is also used to utilize structural information, but at the systematical level, not the local level. Empirical investigations on real life networks, the Snake Idioms Network, and several other well-known networks, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed entropic metric, notably outperforming other centrality metrics in identifying the top-k most important nodes.