Correlations among centrality measures in complex networks

Abstract

In this paper, we empirically investigate correlations among four centrality measures, originated from the social science, of various complex networks. For each network, we compute the centrality measures, from which the partial correlation as well as the correlation coefficient among measures is estimated. We uncover that the degree and the betweenness centrality are highly correlated; furthermore, the betweenness follows a power-law distribution irrespective of the type of networks. This characteristic is further examined in terms of the conditional probability distribution of the betweenness, given the degree. The conditional distribution also exhibits a power-law behavior independent of the degree which explains partially, if not whole, the origin of the power-law distribution of the betweenness. A similar analysis on the random network reveals that these characteristics are not found in the random network.