A voting mechanism-based approach for identifying key nodes in complex networks

Many mechanisms, such as epidemic spread, rumor spread, and the spread of social emergencies, are closely related to complex network dynamics, and mining their key nodes plays an important role in understanding the structure and function of the network and maintaining its stable operation. In response to the problem that the key node identification methods in complex networks cannot comprehensively consider global and local information and ignore low-degree nodes, this study proposes a new method based on the voting mechanism. Firstly, the CI value of the network nodes is calculated using the CI algorithm, and initialized the voting ability of nodes by CI values, fully considering the local information of the nodes as well as the influence of low-degree nodes. Secondly, the concept of voting probability is introduced to distinguish the votes of network nodes for their different neighboring nodes through the voting probability, to consider more local information, and to comprehensively assess the importance of the nodes, and ultimately, it is more important to get nodes with the larger voting score. Comparing several classical key node identification methods, the experimental results show that this method can effectively identify key nodes and has a high accuracy rate in different complex networks.