Measures for Network Structural Dependency Analysis

A set of new measures for network structural dependency analysis is introduced. These measures are based on geodesic distance, which is the number of links in a shortest path. They capture the structural dependency effect at the path level, the node level, and the overall network level, and hence can be used to index such dependencies. Unlike the related literature measures, a novel aspect of the proposed measures is that the impact of network fragmentation caused by a node failure is taken into explicit consideration in deciding the structural dependency effect. As a result, when applied to critical node identification in a network, the proposed measures give results that are more in line with intuition.