• DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2206.00381
• Corpus ID: 249240476

The statistical nature of h-index of a network node

@article{Liu2022TheSN,
  title={The statistical nature of h-index of a network node},
  author={Yan Liu and Mudi Jiang and Lianyu Hu and Zengyou He},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2022},
  volume={abs/2206.00381}
}

• Yan Liu, Mudi Jiang, +1 author Zengyou He
• Published 1 June 2022
• Computer Science
• ArXiv

Evaluating the importance of a network node is a crucial task in network science and graph data mining. H -index is a popular centrality measure for this task, however, there is still a lack of its interpretation from a rigorous statistical aspect. Here we show the statistical nature of h -index from the perspective of order statistics, and we obtain a new family of centrality indices by generalizing the h -index along this direction. The theoretical and empirical evidence shows that such a statistical interpretation enables us to obtain a general and versatile framework for quantifying the importance of a network node. Under this framework, many new centrality indices can be derived and some of which can be more accurate and robust than h -index. We believe that this research opens up new avenues for developing more effective indices for node importance quantification from a viewpoint that still remains unexplored.