A Novel Method to Identify Key Nodes in Complex Networks Based on Degree and Neighborhood Information

One key challenge within the domain of network science is accurately finding important nodes within a network. In recent years, researchers have proposed various node centrality indicators from different perspectives. However, many existing methods have their limitations. For instance, certain approaches lack a balance between time efficiency and accuracy, while the majority of research neglects the significance of local clustering coefficients, a crucial node property. Thus, this paper introduces a centrality metric called DNC (degree and neighborhood information centrality) that considers both node degree and local clustering coefficients. The combination of these two aspects provides DNC with the ability to create a more comprehensive measure of nodes’ local centrality. In addition, in order to obtain better performance in different networks, this paper sets a tunable parameter α to control the effect of neighbor information on the importance of nodes. Subsequently, the paper proceeds with a sequence of experiments, including connectivity tests, to validate the efficacy of DNC. The results of the experiments demonstrate that DNC captures more information and outperforms the other eight centrality metrics.