Assessing network vulnerability in a community structure point of view

Abstract

We introduce Community structure Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) problem to assess the network vulnerability under a community structure point of view. Given a positive number k, CVA aims to find out the k most vulnerable nodes whose removals maximally transform the current network community structure to a different one. As the first attempt, we suggest an approximation algorithm for the special case k = 1, and propose multiple greedy algorithms for CVA problem. To certify the effectiveness of suggested approaches, we test them on not only synthesized networks with known community structures but also on real-world social traces.