Network Disintegration in Criminal Network

Social network analysis is nowadays attracting many researchers from different domains to study a large spectrum of issues such as node centrality (the position of nodes in the network or node importance), network evolution, community identification and so on. Central nodes are the ones that are linked to other nodes in the network in an extensive or critical manner because either they have many neighbors, or play the role of mediator or are very close to the other nodes. Therefore, the removal of these central nodes may propagate and lead to a disintegration of the network or a slowness in the information flow. The objective of this paper is to propose a new technique towards network destabilization that first identifies the community of the nodes and then targeting key nodes and links to be deleted to further apply the cascading removal solution at subsequent steps if needed. More precisely, it is a two-step procedure which at the first stage detects communities in a given network and deletes the links between them, eliminates key nodes inside each community at the second step.