Identifying vital nodes based on reverse greedy method

The identification of vital nodes that maintain the network connectivity is a long-standing challenge in network science. In this paper, we propose a so-called reverse greedy method where the least important nodes are preferentially chosen to make the size of the largest component in the corresponding induced subgraph as small as possible. Accordingly, the nodes being chosen later are more important in maintaining the connectivity. Empirical analyses on eighteen real networks show that the reverse greedy method performs remarkably better than well-known state-of-the-art methods.