Evaluation of node position based on email communication

Rapid development of various kinds of social networks within the Internet enabled investigation of their properties and analyzing their structure. An interesting scientific problem in this domain is the assessment of the node position within the directed, weighted graph that represents the social network of email users. The new method of node position analysis, which takes into account both the node positions of the neighbors and the strength of connections between network nodes, is presented in the paper. The node position can be used to discover key network users, who are the most important in the population and who have potentially the greatest influence on others. The experiments carried out on two datasets enabled studying the main properties of the new measure.