Identifying influential nodes in complex networks based on network embedding and local structure entropy

Abstract The identification of influential nodes in complex networks remains a crucial research direction, as it paves the way for analyzing and controlling information diffusion. The currently presented network embedding algorithms are capable of representing high-dimensional and sparse networks with low-dimensional and dense vector spaces, which not only keeps the network structure but also has high accuracy. In this work, a novel centrality approach based on network embedding and local structure entropy, called the ELSEC , is proposed for capturing richer information to evaluate the importance of nodes from the view of local and global perspectives. In short, firstly, the local structure entropy is used to measure the self importance of nodes. Secondly, the network is mapped to a vector space to calculate the Manhattan distance between nodes by using the Node2vec network embedding algorithm, and the global importance of nodes is defined by combining the correlation coefficients. To reveal the effectiveness of the ELSEC, we select three types of algorithms for identifying key nodes as contrast approaches, including methods based on node centrality, optimal decycling based algorithms and graph partition based methods, and conduct experiments on ten real networks for correlation, ranking monotonicity, accuracy of high ranking nodes and the size of the giant connected component. Experimental results show that the ELSEC algorithm has excellent ability to identify influential nodes.