Centralities

Abstract

The increase of interest in the analysis of contemporary social networks, for both academic and economic reasons, has highlighted the inherent difficulties in handling large and complex structures. Among the tools provided by researchers for network analysis, the centrality notion, capturing the importance of individuals in a graph, is of particular interest. Despite many definitions and implementations of centrality, no clear advantage is given to a particular paradigm for the study of social network characteristics. In this paper we review, compare and highlight the strengths of different definitions of centralities in contemporary social networks.