Weighted H-index for identifying influential spreaders

Spreading is a ubiquitous process in the social, biological and technological systems. Therefore, identifying influential spreaders, which is important to prevent epidemic spreading and to establish effective vaccination strategies, is full of theoretical and practical significance. In this paper, a weighted h-index centrality based on virtual nodes extension is proposed to quantify the spreading influence of nodes in complex networks. Simulation results on real-world networks reveal that the proposed method provides more accurate and more consistent ranking than the five classical methods. Moreover, we observe that the monotonicity and the computational complexity of our measure can also yield excellent performance.