A dynamic weighted TOPSIS method for identifying influential nodes in complex networks

Identifying the influential nodes in complex networks is a challenging and significant research topic. Though various centrality measures of complex networks have been developed for addressing the problem, they all have some disadvantages and limitations. To make use of the advantages of different centrality measures, one can regard influential node identification as a multi-attribute decision-making problem. In this paper, a dynamic weighted Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is developed. The key idea is to assign the appropriate weight to each attribute dynamically, based on the grey relational analysis method and the Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by applications to three actual networks, which indicates that our method has better performance than single indicator methods and the original weighted TOPSIS method.