It's Not Whom You Know, It's What You (or Your Friends) Can Do: Succint Coalitional Frameworks for Network Centralities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework combining social networks with cooperative skill games to define and compute new centrality measures, emphasizing neighbors' roles in task completion.

Contribution

It presents a new expressive framework for network centrality based on cooperative skill games, with fixed-parameter tractability results for computation.

Findings

Framework effectively models neighbor influence on centrality

New centrality measures capture task-related influence

Computational methods are fixed-parameter tractable

Abstract

We investigate the representation of measures of network centrality using a framework that blends a social network representation with the succint formalism of cooperative skill games. We discuss the expressiveness of the new framework and highlight some of its advantages, including a fixed-parameter tractability result for computing centrality measures under such representations. As an application we introduce new network centrality measures that capture the extent to which neighbors of a certain node can help it complete relevant tasks.