What Is Centrality?

Centrality

We’re going to start studying some complex network measurements, with a big focus on centrality measures.

Complex networks are usually too big and complex to inspect visually. Because of that, we need to extract measurements from it to understand how it’s organized and how it behaves. Knowing what each metric represents can give us a piece of a puzzle that’s generated by the overall existence of the network.

The concept of centrality in complex networks is usually associated with importance. If a node is central to the network, then it should be relevant for both the topological structure of the network, as well for the dynamics of the network.

As we’ll see, this concept of importance is hard to define. And because no single definition exists, we have a variety of different centrality measures, each one measuring one different aspect of a network.