Current flow closeness centrality (CFCC) has a better discriminating ability than the ordinary closeness centrality based on shortest paths. In this paper, we extend this notion to a group of vertices in a weighted graph, and then study the problem of finding a subset S of k vertices to maximize its CFCC C(S), both theoretically and experimentally. We show that the problem is NP-hard, but propose two greedy algorithms for minimizing the reciprocal of C(S) with provable guarantees using the monotoncity and supermodularity. The first is a deterministic algorithm with an approximation factor (1 − k k−1 · 1 e ) and cubic running time; while the second is a randomized algorithm with a (1 − k k−1 · 1 e − ǫ)-approximation and nearly-linear running time for any ǫ > 0. Extensive experiments on model and real networks demonstrate that our algorithms are effective and efficient, with the second algorithm being scalable to massive networks with more than a million vertices.
A subset of the authors of this paper (Li, Yi, and Zhang) and Peng and Shan recently REF studied the problem of finding a set S of k vertices so that the quantity
Current Flow Group Closeness Centrality for Complex Networks
WWW'2019
Computer Science