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Concept
Centrality
Summary
In graph theory and network analysis, indicators of centrality assign numbers or rankings to nodes within a graph corresponding to their network position. Applications include identifying the most influential person(s) in a social network, key infrastructure nodes in the Internet or urban networks, super-spreaders of disease, and brain networks. Centrality concepts were first developed in social network analysis, and many of the terms used to measure centrality reflect their sociological origin.
Centrality indices are answers to the question "What characterizes an important vertex?" The answer is given in terms of a real-valued function on the vertices of a graph, where the values produced are expected to provide a ranking which identifies the most important nodes.
The word "importance" has a wide number of meanings, leading to many different definitions of centrality. Two categorization schemes have been proposed. "Importance" can be conceived in relation to a type of flow or transfer across the network. This allows centralities to be classified by the type of flow they consider important. "Importance" can alternatively be conceived as involvement in the cohesiveness of the network. This allows centralities to be classified based on how they measure cohesiveness. Both of these approaches divide centralities in distinct categories. A further conclusion is that a centrality which is appropriate for one category will often "get it wrong" when applied to a different category.
Many, though not all, centrality measures effectively count the number of paths (also called walks) of some type going through a given vertex; the measures differ in how the relevant walks are defined and counted. Restricting consideration to this group allows for taxonomy which places many centralities on a spectrum from those concerned with walks of length one (degree centrality) to infinite walks (eigenvector centrality). Other centrality measures, such as betweenness centrality focus not just on overall connectedness but occupying positions that are pivotal to the network's connectivity.
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