Understanding Information Centrality Metric: A Simulation Approach

Identifying the central people in information flow networks is essential to understanding how people communicate and coordinate as well as who controls the information flows in the network. However, the appropriate usage of centrality metrics depends on an understanding of the type of network flow. Networks can vary in the way node-to-node transmission takes place, or in the way a course through the network is taken, thereby leading to different types of information flow processes. When metrics are used for an inappropriate flow process, the result of the metric can be misleading and often incorrect. In this paper we create a simulation of the flow of information in a network, and then we investigate the relation of information centrality as well as other network centralities, like betweenness, closeness and eigenvector along with the outcome of simulations with information flowing through walks rather than paths, trails or geodesics. We find that Information Centrality is more similar to Eigenvector and Degree centrality than to Closeness centrality as postulated by previous literature. We also find an interesting pattern emerge from the inter metric correlations.