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Related papers: Locating the Source in Real-world Diffusion Networ…

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Detecting the origin of information or infection spread in networks is a fundamental challenge with applications in misinformation tracking, epidemiology, and beyond. We study the multi-source detection problem: given snapshot observations…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Xingchao Jian , Purui Zhang , Lan Tian , Feng Ji , Wenfei Liang , Wee Peng Tay , Bihan Wen , Felix Krahmer

The problem of finding the optimal set of source nodes in a diffusion network that maximizes the spread of information, influence, and diseases in a limited amount of time depends dramatically on the underlying temporal dynamics of the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2012-05-09 Manuel Gomez Rodriguez , Bernhard Schölkopf

Locating sources of diffusion and spreading from minimum data is a significant problem in network science with great applied values to the society. However, a general theoretical framework dealing with optimal source localization is…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2017-03-16 Zhao-Long Hu , Xiao Han , Ying-Cheng Lai , Wen-Xu Wang

We address the problem of localizing the source of infection in an undirected, tree-structured network under a susceptible-infected outbreak model. The infection propagates with independent random time increments (i.e., edge-delays) between…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-14 Kesler O'Connor , Julia M. Jess , Devlin Costello , Manuel E. Lladser

This paper investigates the problem of utilizing network topology and partial timestamps to detect the information source in a network. The problem incurs prohibitive cost under canonical maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the source…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-06-02 Xuecheng Liu , Luoyi Fu , Bo Jiang , Xiaojun Lin , Xinbing Wang

We study the inference of the origin and the pattern of contamination in water distribution networks. We assume a simplified model for the dyanmics of the contamination spread inside a water distribution network, and assume that at some…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-12-07 Alfredo Braunstein , Alejandro Lage-Castellanos , Ernesto Ortega

To infer a diffusion network based on observations from historical diffusion processes, existing approaches assume that observation data contain exact occurrence time of each node infection, or at least the eventual infection statuses of…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Hao Huang , Qian Yan , Keqi Han , Ting Gan , Jiawei Jiang , Quanqing Xu , Chuanhui Yan

We study the problem of identifying the source of emerging large-scale outbreaks of foodborne disease. To solve the source identification problem we formulate a probabilistic model of the contamination diffusion process as a random walk on…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-05-09 Abigail L. Horn , Hanno Friedrich

We study the problem of identifying infection sources in a network based on the network topology, and a subset of infection timestamps. In the case of a single infection source in a tree network, we derive the maximum likelihood estimator…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Wenchang Tang , Feng Ji , Wee Peng Tay

Locating the source that triggers a dynamical process is a fundamental but challenging problem in complex networks, ranging from epidemic spreading in society and on the Internet to cancer metastasis in the human body. An accurate…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-11-15 Zhesi Shen , Shinan Cao , Wen-Xu Wang , Zengru Di , H. Eugene Stanley

We introduce a new method to efficiently approximate the number of infections resulting from a given initially-infected node in a network of susceptible individuals. Our approach is based on counting the number of possible infection walks…

Biological Physics · Physics 2012-10-25 Frank Bauer , Joseph T. Lizier

Given an aftermath of a cascade in the network, i.e. a set $V_I$ of "infected" nodes after an epidemic outbreak or a propagation of rumors/worms/viruses, how can we infer the sources of the cascade? Answering this challenging question is…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2016-08-24 Hung T. Nguyen , Preetam Ghosh , Michael L. Mayo , Thang N. Dinh

This paper studies the problem of identifying the contagion source when partial timestamps of a contagion process are available. We formulate the source localization problem as a ranking problem on graphs, where infected nodes are ranked…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2014-12-16 Kai Zhu , Zhen Chen , Lei Ying

Information diffusion in networks can be used to model many real-world phenomena, including rumor spreading on online social networks, epidemics in human beings, and malware on the Internet. Informally speaking, the source localization…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2015-10-08 Kai Zhu , Lei Ying

Nowadays, the diffusion of information through social networks is a powerful phenomenon. One common way to model diffusions in social networks is the Independent Cascade (IC) model. Given a set of infected nodes according to the IC model, a…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yael Sabato , Amos Azaria , Noam Hazon

We present a method aimed to compute the communicability (broadcast and receive) of nodes through causal paths in temporal networks. The method considers all possible combinations of chronologically ordered products of adjacency matrices of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-02-07 Agostino Funel

Nowadays it is not uncommon to have to deal with dissemination on multi-layered networks and often finding the source of said propagation can be a crucial task. In this paper we tackle this exact problem with a maximum likelihood approach…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Robert Paluch , Łukasz G. Gajewski , K. Suchecki , Janusz A. Hołyst

In this paper, we study a problem of detecting the source of diffused information by querying individuals, given a sample snapshot of the information diffusion graph, where two queries are asked: {\em (i)} whether the respondent is the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jaeyoung Choi , Sangwoo Moon , Jiin Woo , Kyunghwan Son , Jinwoo Shin , Yung Yi

We study the problem of estimating the origin of an epidemic outbreak -- given a contact network and a snapshot of epidemic spread at a certain time, determine the infection source. Finding the source is important in different contexts of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-11-20 Andrey Y. Lokhov , Marc Mézard , Hiroki Ohta , Lenka Zdeborová

As an important type of dynamics on complex networks, spreading is widely used to model many real processes such as the epidemic contagion and information propagation. One of the most significant research questions in spreading is to rank…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-12-18 Ye Sun , Long Ma , An Zeng , Wen-Xu Wang