Axiomatic Analysis of Medial Centrality Measures

Abstract: We perform the first axiomatic analysis of medial centrality measures. These measures, also called betweenness-like centralities, assess the role of a node in connecting others in the network. We focus on a setting with one target node and several source nodes. We consider three classic medial centrality measures adapted to this setting: Betweenness Centrality, Stress Centrality and Random Walk Betweenness Centrality. While Betweenness and Stress Centralities assume that the information in the network follows shortest paths, Random Walk Betweenness Centrality assumes it moves randomly along the edges. We develop the first axiomatic characterizations of all three measures. Our analysis shows that Random Walk Betweenness, while conceptually different, shares several common properties with classic Betweenness and Stress Centralities.