CINNA: An R/CRAN package to decipher Central Informa-tive Nodes in Network Analysis

Abstract

In network science, usually there is a critical step known as centrality analysis. This is an important step, since by using centrality measures, a large number of vertices with low priority are set aside and only a few ones remain to be used for further inferential outcomes. In the other words, these measures help us to sieve our large network and distinguish coarse vertices. By that, important decisions could be made based on the circumstances of these vertices on the overall behavior of networks. These vertices are potentially assumed as central or essential nodes. However, the centrality analysis has always been accompanied by a series of ambiguities, since there are a large number of well-known centrality measures, with different algorithms pointing to these essential nodes and there is no well-defined preference. Which measure explore more information in a given network about node essentiality according to the topological features? While here, we tried to provide a pipeline to have a comparison among all proper centrality measures regarding the network structure and choose the most informative one according to dimensional reduction methods. Central Informative Nodes in Network Analysis (CINNA) package is prepared to gather all required function for centrality analysis in the weighted/unweighted and directed/undirected networks.\n\nAvailability and implementationCINNA is available in CRAN, including a tutorial. URL: https://cran.r-proiect.org/web/packages/CINNA/index.html\n\nContact: miafari@pasteur.ac.ir