Uncovering and classifying the role of driven nodes in control of complex networks

The widely used Maximum Matching (MM) method identifies the minimum driver nodes set to control biological and technological systems. Nevertheless, it is assumed in the MM approach that one driver node can send control signal to multiple target nodes, which might not be appropriate in certain complex networks. A recent work introduced a constraint that one driver node can control one target node, and proposed a method to identify the minimum target nodes set under such a constraint. We refer such target nodes to driven nodes. However, the driven nodes may not be uniquely determined. Here, we develop a novel algorithm to classify driven nodes in control categories. Our computational analysis on a large number of biological networks indicates that the number of driven nodes is considerably larger than the number of driver nodes, not only in all examined complete plant metabolic networks but also in several key human pathways, which firstly demonstrate the importance of use of driven nodes in analysis of real-world networks.