Super-Spreader Identification Using Meta-Centrality

Super-spreaders are the nodes of a network that can maximize their impacts on other nodes, e.g., in the case of information spreading or virus propagation. Many centrality measures have been proposed to identify such nodes from a given network. However, it has been observed that the identification accuracy based on those measures is not always satisfactory among different types of networks. In addition, the nodes identified by using single centrality are not always placed in the top section, where the super-spreaders are supposed to be, of the ranking generated by simulation. In this paper we take a meta-centrality approach by combining different centrality measures using a modified version of Borda count aggregation method. As a result, we are able to improve the performance of super-spreader identification for a broad range of real-world networks. While doing so, we discover a pattern in the centrality measures involved in the aggregation with respect to the topological structures of the networks used in the experiments. Further, we study the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix, also known as Laplacian spectrum, and by using the Earth Mover's distance as a metric for the spectrum, we are able to identify four clusters to explain the aggregation results.