A new evidential methodology of identifying influential nodes in complex networks

In the field of complex networks, how to identify influential nodes in complex networks is still an open research topic. In the existing evidential centrality (EVC), the global structure information in complex networks is not taken into consideration. In addition, EVC also has the limitation that only can be applied on weighted networks. In this paper, a New Evidential Centrality (NEC) is proposed by modifying the Basic Probability Assignment (BPA) strength generated by EVC. According to the shortest paths between the nodes in the network rather than just considering local information, some other BPAs are constructed. With a modified combination rule of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, the new centrality measure is determined. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.