Latent Topical Brokers

Betweenness centrality(BC) helps us find the nodes that are important topical brokers — they are connecting the different topics together and also have a high degree. In other words, they are influential not only because they have many connections, but also because their connections are quite diverse. Usually, BC will be correlated with the degree, but not always. Here is where we come to another important related metric: BC / degree. We call these nodes latent topical brokers.

Latent topical brokers indicate the nodes that have the highest betweenness centrality per degree. In other words, these are the nodes that may connect to only a few nodes, but the nodes they connect to are quite important. It's like those gray cardinals in politics who may be not so well known, but they can talk to all the diverse groups and the right people. 

Take a look at the InfraNodus graph of the crypto news discourse. While the word "SEC" is not very well connected (so it's quite small on the graph), it connects to important clusters of nodes (hedge funds and coinbase), so it becomes a really relevant concept that links different, seemingly unrelated topics.

In InfraNodus you can find this metric in the Insight panel > Latent Topical Brokers