December 6, 2025
Reza Sharafdini

Reza Sharafdini

Academic Rank: Associate professor
Address: -
Degree: Ph.D in Mathematics - Algebra
Phone: 77-31222750
Faculty: Faculty of Intelligent Systems and Data Science

Research

Title
Group centralization of network vertex-based centrality indices
Type Thesis
Keywords
تحليل شبكه، مركزي سازي، مركزي سازي گروهي، درجه، نزديكي، بينابيني، خروج از مركز
Researchers haneyeh amroni (Student) , Reza Sharafdini (First primary advisor) , Mohammad Fozouni (Advisor)

Abstract

In this thesis, first, we study the extention of the standard network centrality measures of degree, closeness and betweenness to apply to groups and classes as well as individuals. The group centrality measures will enable researchers to answer such questions as 'among middle managers in a given organization, which are more central, the men or the women?' With these measures we can also solve the inverse problem: given the network of ties among organization members, how can we form a team that is maximally central? The measures are illustrated using two classic network data sets. We also formalize a measure of group centrality efficiency, which indicates the extent to which a group's centrality is principally due to a small subset of its members. Second, we study the notion of group centralization with respect to eccentricity, degree and betweenness centrality measures. For groups of size 2, we determine the maximum achieved value of group eccentricity and group betweenness centralization and describe the corresponding extremal graphs. For group degree centralization, we do the same with arbitrary size of group. %We conclude with posing few open problems. Finally, we focus on degree-based measures group degree centrality $GD$ and its centralization $GD_1$. We address the following questions: i) For a fixed $k$, which $k$-subset $S$ of vertices $G$, $\dbinom{V(G)}{k}$, represents the most central group? ii) Among all possible values of $k$, which is the one for which the corresponding set $S$ is most central? How can we efficiently compute both $k$ and $S$? To answer these questions, we relate with the well-studied areas of domination and set covers. Using this, we first observe that determining $S$ from the first question is NP-hard. Then, we describe a greedy approximation algorithm which computes centrality values over all group sizes $k$ from 1 to $n$ in linear time, and achieve a group degree centrality value of at least $(1-1/e)(w^\ast - k)$, where $w^\ast$ is