Predicting a Social Network Structure Once a Node Is Deleted

Social networks are dynamic structures in which entities and links appear and disappear for different reasons. Starting from the observation that each entity has a more or less important role within the network, the objective of this article is to propose a method which exploits the role played by nodes to predict the new structure of a social network once one entity disappears. The role of a node in the network is expressed in terms of the number of interactions it has with the rest of the network. Two roles are considered: the leader and the mediator with their corresponding measure: the degree centrality and the betweenness centrality.