Graph Theory: How to compute closeness centrality for each node in a set of data?

Question

I'd like to learn how to apply network theory to my own cache of relational data. I'm trying to build a demo of a new way of browsing a music library, using network theory, that I think would make for a very intuitive and useful way of finding the right song at any given time.

I have all the data (artists as nodes, similarity from 0 to 1 between each artist and those it is related to) and I can already program, but I don't know how to actually calculate the centrality of a node from that. I've spent a while trying to email different professors at my school but no one seems to know where I can learn this.

I hope someone's done something similar. Thanks in advance you guys!

~Jordan

Answer 1

Here are various centrality measures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

This is an important paper in this field: A faster algorithm for betweenness centrality

At page 3 you see four centrality measures, if I recall correctly (it's been years!), there is an algorithm in this paper that computes all of them.