Identifying influential nodes by leveraging redundant ties

Bitao Dai, Shuo Qin, Suoyi Tan, Chuchu Liu, Jianhong Mou, Hongzhong Deng, Fredrik Liljeros, Xin Lu

Abstract: Highlights•A novel centrality metric considering link redundancy is developed to identify influential nodes in complex networks.•The proposed metric, MSTDC, is superior in identifying influential nodes compared to other methods.•This study provides novel insights for considering the role of link redundancy by constructing spanning trees.•MSTDC has low computational complexity and is of potential to be applied to other network-related tasks.