Identifying Influential Spreaders by Spring Model

In order to identify influential spreaders precisely, two new methods of identifying influential spreaders based on the spring model are proposed. Our methods consider two nodes i and j as well as the shortest path between them as a spring, meanwhile, the product of the SLC values of nodes i and j is viewed as the stiffness factor, the difference between network diameter and the shortest path length between two nodes is deemed as the deformation quantity. Using the SIR model to obtain the average spreading scope of each node, evaluated by Kendall’s Tau (τ), the simulation results on fourteen real networks show that the SM+ method and the LSM+ method outperform ten other classical or novel methods, especially, the LSM+ method performs best on eight networks out of the picked fourteen networks.