A novel method to evaluate node importance in complex networks

The measurement of node importance in complex networks has an important impact on the stability and robustness of networks, such as stopping the spread of disease and rumors and preventing power grids from being powered off. A variety of network centricity criteria are used to evaluate the importance of nodes, while each of them accompanied by a single criterion has its own shortcomings and limitations. A novel method is therefore proposed to rank node importance based on combining the existing centrality criteria. This paper considers degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality and raises an integrated measuring method to evaluate node importance in complex networks. In our method, the weight of each criterion is calculated by entropy weighting method which overcomes the impact of the subjective factor, and the Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method is used for ranking nodes’ importance. Finally, four experiments are conducted based on four actual networks to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of ranking node importance of the proposed method is better than a single centrality criterion. •Entropy weighting method and VIKOR are combined to rank importance of nodes.•Weight of criterion is obtained using entropy weighting method.•Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms a single centrality criterion.•The proposed method can reduce the frequency of nodes with the same ranking.