P-centrality: An Improvement for Information Diffusion Maximization in Weighted Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. have attracted many users all around the world. Based on the centrality concept, many methods are proposed in order to find influential users in an online social network. However, the performance of these methods is not always acceptable. In this paper, we proposed a new improvement on centrality measures called P-centrality measure in which the effects of node predecessors are considered. In an extended measure called EP-centrality, the effect of the preceding predecessors of node predecessors are also considered. We also defined a combination of two centrality measures called NodePower (NP) to improve the effectiveness of the proposed metrics. The performance of utilizing our proposed centrality metrics in comparison with the conventional centrality measures is evaluated by Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. The results show that the proposed metrics display better performance finding influential users than normal ones due to Kendall’s τ coefficient metric.