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Which Measures Of Node Centralities Can Be Applied To A Biological Network?

Node Centralities are parameters that, given a node's position and connections, indicate its importance within a network. The simplest example of node centrality is the degree, which is the number of edges connected to a node; but there are a lot of other ways to measure node centrality, for example betweenness, stress, closeness, centroid, etc..

How many measures for node centralities do you know, that could be applied to a biological network? Can you recommend a good review of reference to compare these measures, and their meaning in a biological context?

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2 answers

I'll put some answers to get this discussion started.

  • The Wikipedia page describes 4 node centrality measures: Degree, Betweenness, Closeness and Eigenvector.

  • I like the description of different Node Centrality measures in the supplementary materials of the paper for Centiscape, a plugin for Cytoscape. There are good description of the possible biological meanings of each measure

  • a tool called CentiBin can calculate various measures of Node Centralities. Its documentation and its related publication are a good source to be started.

Here is what I can offer from someone who once gave me advice for a similar question:

Here are some topological graph measures that you may find useful. The more commonly used measures are at the top.

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