Social Network Analysis
Module 2 - Centrality
Centrality is a collection of metrics used to quantify how important and influential a
specific node is to the network as a whole.
There are several centrality measures, but we will cover :
1. Degree
2. Closeness
3. Betweenness
Lets find the most influential node of the above graph by using centrality measures:
1. Degree
A node’s degree is the number of edges the node has. In an undirected network,
there’s only one measure for degree. For example, if node A has edges connecting it
to node B and node D, then node A’s degree is two. In a directed graph network, there
is in-degree (incoming edges) and out-degree(outgoing edges).
For above example:
Sr. No. Node In Degree Out Degree
1 A 2 1
2 B 1 1
3 C 0 2
4 D 1 1
5 E 0 1
Here A is the node with max in degree and C is the node with max out degree.
2. Closeness
Closeness measures how well connected a node is to every other node in the network.
A node’s closeness is the average number of hops required to reach every other node
in the network. A hop is the path of an edge from one node to another.
For example, node A is connected to node B, and node B is connected to node C. For
node A to reach node C it would take two hops.
Closeness centrality can help find good ‘broadcasters’, but in a highly-connected
network, you will often find all nodes have a similar score. What may be more useful
is using Closeness to find Influencers in a single cluster.
For the above example:
Source Destination Hops
A B A-B
C -
D -
E -
Source Destination Hops
B C -
D -
A -
E -
Source Destination Hops
C D C-D
A C-A
B -
E -
Source Destination Hops
D A -
B D-B
C -
E -
Source Destination Hops
E A E-A
B E-A-B
C -
D -
From above we can conclude that A and C are good broadcasters of the graph.
3. Betweenness
Betweenness centrality measures the number of times a node lies on the shortest path
between other nodes.
This measure shows which nodes are ‘bridges’ between nodes in a network. It does
this by identifying all the shortest paths and then counting how many times each node
falls on one.
From the table in closeness centrality, A falls on the shortest route of E-A-B.
Thus A acts as the bridge between E and B.
Since there are no other bridge nodes, A becomes the only bridge node in the graph.
From above three measures we can thus conclude, A is the most influential node of
the graph.
