Local structure entropy of complex networks

Identifying influential nodes in the complex networks is of theoretical and practical significance. There are many methods are proposed to identify the influential nodes in the complex networks. In this paper, a local structure entropy which is based on the degree centrality and the statistical mechanics is proposed to identifying the influential nodes in the complex network. In the definition of the local structure entropy, each node has a local network, the local structure entropy of each node is equal to the structure entropy of the local network. The main idea in the local structure entropy is try to use the influence of the local network to replace the node’s influence on the whole network. The influential nodes which are identified by the local structure entropy are the intermediate nodes in the network. The intermediate nodes which connect those nodes with a big value of degree. We use the Susceptible − Infective (SI) model to evaluate the performance of the influential nodes which are identified by the local structure entropy. In the SI model the nodes use as the source of infection. According to the SI model, the bigger the percentage of the infective nodes in the network the important the node to the whole networks. The simulation on four real networks show that the proposed method is efficacious and rationality to identify the influential nodes in the complex networks.