Abstract: In complex networks, how to quantify the importance of the node is a basic problem. First elaborated some of the existing computational method, then proposed an evaluation method for node importance based on mutual informalion. This method precisely reveals topology characteristic of the network, reflecting the relative importance of nodes. The experiment on the comparison and the analysis with other methods shows that the evaluation method based on mutual information is simple and effective, it is suitable for evaluating the node importance in large-scale complex networks.

Key words: Complex networks, Node importance, Mutual information, Topology, Connection