Centrality Measures: A Tool to Identify Key Actors in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews various centrality measures used to identify key actors in social networks, highlighting their applications and future research directions in network analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of centrality measures and discusses emerging research directions in social network analysis.

Findings

Centrality measures effectively identify important nodes in social networks.

Different measures capture various aspects of node importance.

Research directions include developing new measures and applications.

Abstract

Experts from several disciplines have been widely using centrality measures for analyzing large as well as complex networks. These measures rank nodes/edges in networks by quantifying a notion of the importance of nodes/edges. Ranking aids in identifying important and crucial actors in networks. In this chapter, we summarize some of the centrality measures that are extensively applied for mining social network data. We also discuss various directions of research related to these measures.