Degree and closeness

Centrality
Node Importance
• There are multiple ways of thinking node importance .i.e.
• Number of connection one node has.
Another way
• Another way to think of node importance is Average proximity.
• Means nodes who are important are the nodes that are close to other
nodes or Nodes have high proximity to other nodes

• So Instead of 33 we will have node 9 and instead of 2 we will have 32.

Other stays same.
Another way
• We can say that the node who tend to connect other nodes are
important.
• It means that the nodes that lies in shortest paths or fractions of
shortest path that pass through a node is important node.

• So Instead of having node 9, we have node 33 in top 5 Nodes.

• We have seen some informal ways of measuring node importance.
• Next we will try to formalize this concept
• This topic in general called as network centrality.
• Centrality allows us to find most important nodes in networks.
• We study node importance to know that if any how that node got
removed then it cause whole network rupture or breakup in different
components.
Cases:
• These are the measures that we may discover.
• We will discuss degree and closeness centrality in this lecture.

• In directed graphs, we can use in-degree, out-degree or combination

of both.
• If you are connected to all nodes then It is 1 if connected to no one then it is 0.
Degree centrality- Directed Network
• So centrality divided into indegree centrality and out degree
centrality.
Out Degree:
• Very same way we can defined the out degree centrality .
2-Closeness centrality:
• It says that the nodes that are important are going to be short distance away from all other nodes in
network.
• Recall the distance between two nodes is length of shortest path between them.

• So closeness centrality pf some node v is number of nodes-1 divided by sum of distances(Shortest paths) of v
to all other nodes
NetworkX for closeness centrality:

• Using it’s definition Lets see how this 0.541 comes.

Assumption and special cases:
• It is assumption that all nodes can not reach other but this is not the
case always.
• In directed graph it sis general problem and in undirected graph it can
happen when we have disconnected components.
• So how to measure closeness centrality of a node when it can not
reach all other nodes? Such that

• Here Node L can reach only M.

Solutions:
• We have couple of options:

• It is number of nodes that L can reach divided by sum of distances

from L to all other nodes that L can reach.
- R(L) = M, |R(L)|=1
- Denominator = L M = 1 distance
- But it is highest possible
centrality.

So problem is centrality is too high for a node that can reach only one node
Option2:
• Previous one is unintuitive so option2 comes..

• It fraction of nodes that L can reach which make more sense

• We have not changed the definition of Closeness centrality.
In Disconnected graphs:
• How we can ask networkX to compute closeness centrality when
nodes are disconnected in case when we normalize data and when
not normalize it.