A Lightweight Deep Learning-based Model for Ranking Influential Nodes in Complex Networks

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks is a critical task with a wide range of applications across different domains. However, existing approaches often face trade-offs between accuracy and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose 1D-CGS, a lightweight and effective hybrid model that integrates the speed of one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN) with the topological representation power of GraphSAGE for efficient node ranking. The model uses a lightweight input representation built on two straightforward and significant topological features: node degree and average neighbor degree. These features are processed through 1D convolutions to extract local patterns, followed by GraphSAGE layers to aggregate neighborhood information. We formulate the node ranking task as a regression problem and use the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model to generate ground truth influence scores. 1D-CGS is initially trained on synthetic networks generated by the Barabasi-Albert model and then applied to real world networks for identifying influential nodes. Experimental evaluations on twelve real world networks demonstrate that 1D-CGS significantly outperforms traditional centrality measures and recent deep learning models in ranking accuracy, while operating in very fast runtime. The proposed model achieves an average improvement of 4.73% in Kendall's Tau correlation and 7.67% in Jaccard Similarity over the best performing deep learning baselines. It also achieves an average Monotonicity Index (MI) score 0.99 and produces near perfect rank distributions, indicating highly unique and discriminative rankings. Furthermore, all experiments confirm that 1D-CGS operates in a highly reasonable time, running significantly faster than existing deep learning methods, making it suitable for large scale applications.