Ranking Spreaders in Complex Networks Based on the Most Influential Neighbors

Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks is crucial for containing virus spread, accelerating information diffusion, and promoting new products. In this paper, inspired by the effect of leaders on social ties, we propose the most influential neighbors' k-shell index that is the weighted sum of the products between k-core values of itself and the node with the maximum k-shell values. We apply the classical Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model to verify the performance of our method. The experimental results on both real and artificial networks show that the proposed method can quantify the node influence more accurately than degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and k-shell decomposition method.