Eigenvector centrality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eigenvector centrality is a measure of the importance of a node in a network. It assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to high-scoring nodes contribute more to the score of the node in question than equal connections to low-scoring nodes.

Let xi denote the score of the ith node. Let Ai,j be the adjacency matrix of the network. Hence Ai,j = 1 if the ith node is connected to the jth node, and Ai,j = 0 otherwise. More generally, the entries in A can be real numbers representing connection strengths.

For the ith node, let the centrality score be proportional to the sum of the scores of all nodes which are connected to it. Hence

x_i = \frac{1}{\lambda} \sum_{j \in M(i)}x_j

(where M(i) is the set of nodes that are connected to the ith node, N is the total number of nodes and λ is a constant),

or equivalently using the adjacency matrix,

x_i = \frac{1}{\lambda} \sum_{j = 1}^N A_{i,j}x_j

in vector notation this can be rewritten as

\overrightarrow{x} = \frac{1}{\lambda}A\overrightarrow{x} or, A\overrightarrow{x} = {\lambda}\overrightarrow{x}

which is the eigenvector equation.

In general, there will be many different eigenvalues λ for which an eigenvector solution exists. However, the additional requirement that all the entries in the eigenvector be positive implies (by the Perron–Frobenius theorem) that only the greatest eigenvalue results in the desired centrality measure.[1] The ith component of this eigenvector then gives the centrality score of the ith node in the network.

Google's PageRank is a variant of the Eigenvector centrality measure.

  1. ^ M. E. J. Newman. "The mathematics of networks" (PDF). Retrieved on 2006-11-09.
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