Centralization Measures for Social Networks

Abstract

Recently online social networks have grown enormously to become an essential marketing tool for many companies. Therefore, identifying the important or central or influential node is a crucial task. Centrality indicates the most central node or most influential node within a network. Centralization has proven to be a vital tool that helps to solve many problems. Besides the existence of numerous centralization measures, there is a lack of requirements for them. The main contribution of this article are postulates for centralization measures that solve this problem by enforcing intuition behind centralization. To prove the legitimacy of these postulates, a few existing measures that have fulfilled all postulates are shown. The proposed postulates are not only helpful during the formation of new measures but they also represent the perfect tool to compare two different measures.

Keywords:

• Centralization measures
• centralization postulates
• centralization requirements
• graph analysis
• social network analysis