Message Passing Optimization of Harmonic Influence Centrality

Abstract

This paper proposes a new measure of node centrality in social networks, the Harmonic Influence Centrality (HIC), which emerges naturally in the study of social influence over networks. Using an intuitive analogy between social and electrical networks, we introduce a distributed message passing algorithm to compute the HIC of each node. Although its design is based on theoretical results which assume the network to have no cycle, the algorithm can also be successfully applied on general graphs.