Related papers: Spectral Methods for Immunization of Large Network…
Motivated by applications in network epidemiology, we consider the problem of determining whether it is possible to delete at most $k$ edges from a given input graph (of small treewidth) so that the resulting graph avoids a set…
The spread of an epidemic is often modeled by an SIR random process on a social network graph. The MinINF problem for optimal social distancing involves minimizing the expected number of infections, when we are allowed to break at most $B$…
This study explores the vaccine prioritization strategy to reduce the overall burden of the pandemic when the supply is limited. Existing methods conduct macro-level or simplified micro-level vaccine distribution by assuming the homogeneous…
The basic idea of many effective immunization strategies is first to rank the importance of vertices according to the degrees of vertices and then remove the vertices from highest importance to lowest until the network becomes disconnected.…
The popularity of online social media platforms provides an unprecedented opportunity to study real-world complex networks of interactions. However, releasing this data to researchers and the public comes at the cost of potentially exposing…
Graph summarization via node grouping is a popular method to build concise graph representations by grouping nodes from the original graph into supernodes and encoding edges into superedges such that the loss of adjacency information is…
In the context of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, quarantine has been used to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the disease. In this paper, we show that this is not the only benefit of quarantine for the mitigation of an SIR epidemic…
In a networked system, functionality can be seriously endangered when nodes are infected, due to internal random failures or a contagious virus that develops into an epidemic. Given a snapshot of the network representing the nodes' states…
We present an effective immunization strategy for computer networks and populations with broad and, in particular, scale-free degree distributions. The proposed strategy, acquaintance immunization, calls for the immunization of random…
We investigate three aspects of the importance of nodes with respect to Susceptible-Infectious-Removed (SIR) disease dynamics: influence maximization (the expected outbreak size given a set of seed nodes), the effect of vaccination (how…
We consider the target set selection problem. In this problem, a vertex is active either if it belongs to a set of initially activated vertices or if at some point it has at least $k$ active neighbors ($k$ is identical for all vertices of…
We analyze a game-theoretic abstraction of epidemic containment played on an undirected graph $G$: each player is associated with a node in $G$ and can either acquire protection from a contagious process or risk infection. After decisions…
The design of an efficient curing policy, able to stem an epidemic process at an affordable cost, has to account for the structure of the population contact network supporting the contagious process. Thus, we tackle the problem of…
Designing effective strategies for controlling epidemic spread by vaccination is an important question in epidemiology, especially in the early stages when vaccines are limited. This is a challenging question when the contact network is…
We consider the problem of finding the graph on which an epidemic cascade spreads, given only the times when each node gets infected. While this is a problem of importance in several contexts -- offline and online social networks,…
Controlling and understanding epidemic outbreaks has recently drawn great interest in a large spectrum of research communities. Vaccination is one of the most well-established and effective strategies in order to contain an epidemic. In the…
This paper develops and analyzes optimization models for rapid detection of viruses in large contact networks. In the model, a virus spreads in a stochastic manner over an undirected connected graph, under various assumptions on the spread…
We study the epidemic source detection problem in contact tracing networks modeled as a graph-constrained maximum likelihood estimation problem using the susceptible-infected model in epidemiology. Based on a snapshot observation of the…
We study the task of selecting $k$ nodes, in a social network of size $n$, to seed a diffusion with maximum expected spread size, under the independent cascade model with cascade probability $p$. Most of the previous work on this problem…
Most communication networks are complex. In this paper, we address one of the fundamental problems we are facing nowadays, namely, how we can efficiently protect these networks. To this end, we study an immunization strategy and found that…