A graph neural network based on feature network for identifying influential nodes

Abstract

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks is of great importance, and has many applications in practice. For example, finding influential nodes in e-commerce network can provide merchants with customers with strong purchase intent; identifying influential nodes in computer information system can help locating the components that cause the system break down and identifying influential nodes in these networks can accelerate the flow of information in networks. Thus, a lot of efforts have been made on the problem of indentifying influential nodes. However, previous efforts either consider only one aspect of the network structure, or using global centralities with high time consuming as node features to identify influential nodes, and the existing methods do not consider the relationships between different centralities. To solve these problems, we propose a Graph Convolutional Network Framework based on Feature Network, abbreviated as FNGCN (graph convolutional network is abbreviated as GCN in the following text). Further, to exclude noises and reduce redundency, FNGCN utilizes feature network to represent the complicated relationships among the local centralities, based on which the most suitable local centralities are determined. By taking a shallow GCN and a deep GCN into the FNGCN framework, two FNGCNs are developed. With ground truth obtained from the widely used Susceptible Infected Recovered (SIR) model, the two FNGCNs are compared with the state-of-art methods on several real-world networks. Experimental results show that the two FNGCNs can identify the influential nodes more accurately than the compared methods, indicating that the proposed framework is effective in identifying influential nodes in complex networks.