Identifying Hubs Through Influential Nodes in Transportation Network by Using a Gravity Centrality Approach

Code

• github.com/wtepsan/Adjacency-and-Distance-Matrix-of-Thailand
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Abstract

Hubs are strategic locations that function as central nodes within clusters of cities, playing a pivotal role in the distribution of goods, services, and connectivity. Identifying these vital hubs—through analyzing influential locations within transportation networks—is essential for effective urban planning, logistics optimization, and enhancing infrastructure resilience. This task becomes even more crucial in developing and less-developed countries, where such hubs can significantly accelerate urban growth and drive economic development. However, existing hub identification approaches face notable limitations. Traditional centrality measures often yield low variance in node scores, making it difficult to distinguish truly influential nodes. Moreover, these methods typically rely solely on either local metrics or global network structures, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Hybrid Community-based Gravity Centrality (HCGC), which integrates local influence measures, community detection, and gravity-based modeling to more effectively identify influential nodes in complex networks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that HCGC consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of spreading ability across varying truncation radii. To further validate our approach, we introduce ThaiNet, a newly constructed real-world transportation network dataset. The results show that HCGC not only preserves the strengths of traditional local approaches but also captures broader structural patterns, making it a powerful and practical tool for real-world network analysis.

Tasks

Reproductions