A Graph Theoretic Analysis of Leverage Centrality

Abstract: In 2010, Joyce et. al defined the leverage centrality of vertices in a graph as a means to analyze functional connections within the human brain. In this metric a degree of a vertex is compared to the degrees of all it neighbors. We investigate this property from a mathematical perspective. We first outline some of the basic properties and then compute leverage centralities of vertices in different families of graphs. In particular, we show there is a surprising connection between the number of distinct leverage centralities in the Cartesian product of paths and the triangle numbers.