Network robustness and node inequality: an investigation

Network robustness, defined as a network’s ability to sustain functionality despite alterations resulting from natural damages or intentional attacks, is a critical measure of a network’s efficacy. To gain insight into improving network robustness it is useful to study the connection of robustness to other network measures. This paper considers node centrality inequality, a measure that captures inequalities in node centrality values, and its correlation with network robustness. Nine different centrality measures, ten different metrics for robustness and 720 synthetic networks are used in a study to establish a possible correlation between node centrality inequality and network robustness, which is consistently found to be statistically significant.