Establishing Connections in a Social Network - Radial Versus Medial Centrality Indices.

The extent to which a node occupies a central position in a social network amounts to a crucial indicator of personal influence. Few works address the mechanisms that would allow an individual to integrate into a network, and even fewer examine the correlation between this process and various notions of centrality. In this paper, we tackle this problem by focusing on the process in which a newcomer joins a network through building connections and gains centrality. We provide three efficient heuristics that build edges between the newcomer and existing members of a social network and compare their performances in terms of three centrality metrics. We perform experiments on random graphs generated by two synthetic network models and four real-world networks. Not only our heuristics considerably outperform the random benchmark algorithm, but the results also reveal some new insights that are related to centrality and network topology. In particular, the results distinguish between measures along two dimensions: the first concerns with the number of centers in a network, and the second concerns with the type of involvement of a node in the network.