A new model to identify node importance in complex networks based on DEMATEL method.

It is still a hot research topic to identify node importance in complex networks. Recently many methods have been proposed to deal with this problem. However, most of the methods only focus on local or path information, they do not combine local and global information well. In this paper, a new model to identify node importance based on Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is presented. DEMATEL method is based on graph theory which takes the global information into full consideration so that it can effectively identify the importance of one element in the whole complex system. Some experiments based on susceptible-infected (SI) model are used to compare the new model with other methods. The applications in three different networks illustrate the effectiveness of the new model.