Centrality metrics help identify the most critical or influential nodes in a network. Applications include finding the most highly connected individual on a social media platform, which piece of critical infrastructure provides the largest impact to a network if degraded, and helping to identify disease-related superspreading events and contact tracing.
Once you have a link chart with at least one node set and one link set with connecting your nodes, follow these steps to perform centrality analysis:
-
Click the Link Analysis button on the Link Chart Diagram tab to open the analysis tools window.
To minimize the window, click the arrow button at the upper left.
- Under Analysis Method, choose Centrality.
- Next toCentrality, choose one of the following options:
- Betweenness Centrality—How often a node lies on the shortest path between each pair of nodes in the network. Removing or adding a central node may result in the shortest paths to change, necessitating recalculation of the betweenness centrality.
- Closeness Centrality—The reciprocal of the sum of the shortest path distances of a node to all other nodes in the network. A node with the highest closeness centrality score has the shortest average path to all other nodes in the network.
- Degree Centrality—The total number of immediate connections a given node has in the network. These connections can further be divided into incoming or outgoing connections to better understand the nature of the node's relationships to its neighbors.
The analysis runs and the tabular results appear in the analysis window.
You can interact with the tabular results in the analysis window.