A new method for identifying influential nodes and important edges in complex networks

The identification of the influential nodes in a network is of great significance for understanding the features of the network and controlling the complexity of networks in society and in biology. In this paper, we propose a novel centrality measure for a node by considering the importance of edges and compare the performance of this method with existing seven topological-based ranking methods on the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. The simulation results for four different types of real networks show that the proposed method is robust and exhibits excellent performance in identifying the most influential nodes when spreading starting from both single origin and multipleorigins simultaneously.