You Shall Not Pass: Avoiding Spurious Paths in Shortest-Path Based Centralities in Multidimensional Complex Networks

The aggregation process may create spurious paths on the aggregated view of multidimensional (high order) complex networks. Consequently, these spurious paths may then cause shortest-path based centrality metrics to produce incorrect results, thus undermining the network centrality analysis. In this context, we propose a method built upon MultiAspect Graphs (MAGs) able to avoid taking into account spurious paths when computing centralities based on shortest paths in multidimensional complex networks. We show that, by using our proposed method, pitfalls usually associated with spurious paths resulting from aggregation in multidimensional networks can be avoided at the time of the aggregation process. As a result, shortest-path based centralities are assured to be computed correctly for multidimensional networks, without taking into account spurious paths that could otherwise lead to incorrect results. We also present case studies that show the impact of spurious paths in the computing of shortest paths and consequently of shortest-path based centralities, such as betweenness and closeness, thus illustrating the importance of this contribution.