Related papers: Social Bubbles and Superspreaders: Source Identifi…
We consider the task of estimating a network cascade as fast as possible. The cascade is assumed to spread according to a general Susceptible-Infected process with heterogeneous transmission rates from an unknown source in the network.…
Suppose that a cascade (e.g., an epidemic) spreads on an unknown graph, and only the infection times of vertices are observed. What can be learned about the graph from the infection times caused by multiple distinct cascades? Most of the…
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…
When dealing with the dissemination of epidemics, one important question that can be asked is the location where the contamination began. In this paper, we analyze three spreading schemes and propose and validate an effective methodology…
In many real-world scenarios, it is nearly impossible to collect explicit social network data. In such cases, whole networks must be inferred from underlying observations. Here, we formulate the problem of inferring latent social networks…
Information and individual activities often spread globally through the network of social ties. While social contagion phenomena have been extensively studied within the framework of threshold models, it is common to make an assumption that…
Current methods for the detection of contagious outbreaks give contemporaneous information about the course of an epidemic at best. Individuals at the center of a social network are likely to be infected sooner, on average, than those at…
Community structure is an important factor in the behavior of real-world networks because it strongly affects the stability and thus the phase transition order of the spreading dynamics. We here propose a reversible social contagion model…
We consider the problem of identifying an infection source based only on an observed set of infected nodes in a network, assuming that the infection process follows a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model. We derive an estimator…
In this paper, we consider the problem of locating the information source with sparse observations. We assume that a piece of information spreads in a network following a heterogeneous susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model and that a…
Individual-based models of contagious processes are useful for predicting epidemic trajectories and informing intervention strategies. In such models, the incorporation of contact network information can capture the non-randomness and…
Bootstrap percolation is a process that is used to model the spread of an infection on a given graph. In the model considered here each vertex is equipped with an individual threshold. As soon as the number of infected neighbors exceeds…
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…
Identifying super-spreaders can be framed as a subtask of the influence maximisation problem. It seeks to pinpoint agents within a network that, if selected as single diffusion seeds, disseminate information most effectively. Multilayer…
Detecting spreading outbreaks in social networks with sensors is of great significance in applications. Inspired by the formation mechanism of human's physical sensations to external stimuli, we propose a new method to detect the influence…
Several biological and social contagion phenomena, such as superspreading events or social reinforcement, are the results of multi-body interactions, for which hypergraphs offer a natural mathematical description. In this paper, we develop…
Influencing (and being influenced by) others through social networks is fundamental to all human societies. Whether this happens through the diffusion of rumors, opinions, or viruses, identifying the diffusion source (i.e., the person that…
We develop a theoretical framework for the study of epidemic-like social contagion in large scale social systems. We consider the most general setting in which different communication platforms or categories form multiplex networks.…
This monograph provides an overview of the mathematical theories and computational algorithm design for contagion source detection in large networks. By leveraging network centrality as a tool for statistical inference, we can accurately…
Infectious or contagious diseases can be transmitted from one person to another through social contact networks. In today's interconnected global society, such contagion processes can cause global public health hazards, as exemplified by…