Farahi Zahra, Abedian Rooholah, Rocha Luis E C, Kamandi Ali
Department of Algorithms and Computations, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Economics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2025 Aug 26;20(8):e0327699. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0327699. eCollection 2025.
Nodes that play strategic roles in networks are called critical or influential nodes. For example, in an epidemic, we can control the infection spread by isolating critical nodes; in marketing, we can use certain nodes as the initial spreaders aiming to reach the largest part of the network, or they can be selected for removal in targeted attacks to maximise the fragmentation of the network. In this study, we focus on critical node detection in temporal networks. We propose three new measures to identify the critical nodes in temporal networks: the temporal supracycle ratio, temporal semi-local integration, and temporal semi-local centrality. We analyse the performance of these measures based on their effect on the SIR epidemic model in three scenarios: isolating the influential nodes when an epidemic happens, using the influential nodes as seeds of the epidemic, or removing them to analyse the robustness of the network. We compare the results with existing centrality measures, particularly temporal betweenness, temporal centrality, and temporal degree deviation. The results show that the introduced measures help identify influential nodes more accurately. The proposed methods can be used to detect nodes that need to be isolated to reduce the spread of an epidemic or as initial nodes to speedup dissemination of information.
在网络中发挥战略作用的节点被称为关键节点或有影响力的节点。例如,在疫情中,我们可以通过隔离关键节点来控制感染传播;在市场营销中,我们可以将某些节点用作初始传播者,以覆盖网络的最大部分,或者在有针对性的攻击中选择移除它们,以使网络的碎片化程度最大化。在本研究中,我们专注于时间网络中的关键节点检测。我们提出了三种新的方法来识别时间网络中的关键节点:时间超循环比率、时间半局部整合度和时间半局部中心性。我们基于这些方法在三种情况下对SIR疫情模型的影响来分析它们的性能:疫情发生时隔离有影响力的节点、将有影响力的节点用作疫情的传播源或者移除它们以分析网络的鲁棒性。我们将结果与现有的中心性度量方法进行比较,特别是时间中介中心性、时间中心性和时间度偏差。结果表明,引入的这些方法有助于更准确地识别有影响力的节点。所提出的方法可用于检测需要隔离以减少疫情传播的节点,或者用作加速信息传播的初始节点。