A Novel Top-k Strategy for Influence Maximization in Complex Networks with Community Structure

In complex networks, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to identify a set of critical spreaders which help to control the spreading process. Some classic methods are proposed to identify multiple spreaders. However, they sometimes have limitations for the networks with community structure because many chosen spreaders may be clustered in a community. In this paper, we suggest a novel method to identify multiple spreaders from communities in a balanced way. The network is first divided into a great many super nodes and then k spreaders are selected from these super nodes. Experimental results on real and synthetic networks with community structure show that our method outperforms the classic methods for degree centrality, k-core and ClusterRank in most cases.