Game of Thieves and WERW-Kpath: Two Novel Measures of Node and Edge Centrality for Mafia Networks

Real-world complex systems can be modeled as homogeneous or heterogeneous graphs composed by nodes connected by edges. The importance of nodes and edges is formally described by a set of measures called centralities which are typically studied for graphs of small size. The proliferation of digital collection of data has led to huge graphs with billions of nodes and edges. For this reason, we focus on two new algorithms, Game of Thieves and WERW-Kpath which are computationally-light alternatives to the canonical centrality measures such as degree, node and edge betweenness, closeness and clustering. We explore the correlation among these measures using the Spearman’s correlation coefficient on real criminal networks extracted from judicial documents of three Mafia operations. Results of our analysis indicate that Game of Thieves could be used as a more economic replacement to rank both nodes and edges and WERW-Kpath to rank edges.