This paper studies the problem of detecting the information source in a network in which the spread of information follows the popular Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. We assume all nodes in the network are in the susceptible state initially except the information source which is in the infected state. Susceptible nodes may then be infected by infected nodes, and infected nodes may recover and will not be infected again after recovery. Given a snapshot of the network, from which we know all infected nodes but cannot distinguish susceptible nodes and recovered nodes, the problem is to find the information source based on the snapshot and the network topology. We develop a sample path based approach where the estimator of the information source is chosen to be the root node associated with the sample path that most likely leads to the observed snapshot. We prove for infinite-trees, the estimator is a node that minimizes the maximum distance to the infected nodes. A reverse-infection algorithm is proposed to find such an estimator in general graphs. We prove that for @math -regular trees such that @math where @math is the node degree and @math is the infection probability, the estimator is within a constant distance from the actual source with a high probability, independent of the number of infected nodes and the time the snapshot is taken. Our simulation results show that for tree networks, the estimator produced by the reverse-infection algorithm is closer to the actual source than the one identified by the closeness centrality heuristic. We then further evaluate the performance of the reverse infection algorithm on several real world networks.
There have been extensive studies on the spread of epidemics in networks based on the SIR model (see @cite_13 @cite_15 @cite_1 @cite_12 and references within). The work most related to this paper is @cite_5 @cite_17 @cite_7 , in which the information source detection problem was studied under the SI model. @cite_6 @cite_9 considers the problem of detecting multiple information sources under the SI model. This paper considers the SIR model, where infection nodes may recover, which can occur in many practical scenarios as we have explained. Because of node recovery, the information source detection problem under the SIR model differs significantly from that under the SI model. The differences are summarized below. The set of possible sources in the SI model @cite_5 @cite_17 @cite_7 is restricted to the set of infected nodes. In the SIR model, all nodes are possible information sources because we assume susceptible nodes and recovered nodes are indistinguishable and a healthy node may be a recovered node so can be the information source. Therefore, the number of candidate sources is much larger in the SIR model than that in the SI model.
@cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_12 @cite_17
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This paper studies the problem of detecting the information source in a network in which the spread of information follows the popular Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. We assume all nodes in the network are in the susceptible state initially except the information source which is in the infected state. Susceptible nodes may then be infected by infected nodes, and infected nodes may recover and will not be infected again after recovery. Given a snapshot of the network, from which we know all infected nodes but cannot distinguish susceptible nodes and recovered nodes, the problem is to find the information source based on the snapshot and the network topology. We develop a sample path based approach where the estimator of the information source is chosen to be the root node associated with the sample path that most likely leads to the observed snapshot. We prove for infinite-trees, the estimator is a node that minimizes the maximum distance to the infected nodes. A reverse-infection algorithm is proposed to find such an estimator in general graphs. We prove that for g-regular trees such that gq > 1, where g is the node degree and q is the infection probability, the estimator is within a constant distance from the actual source with high probability, independent of the number of infected nodes and the time the snapshot is taken. Our simulation results show that for tree networks, the estimator produced by the reverse-infection algorithm is closer to the actual source than the one identified by the closeness centrality heuristic. 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 small subset of infected nodes are reported, from which we need to find the source of the information. We adopt the sample path based estimator developed in [1], and prove that on infinite trees, the sample path based estimator is a Jordan infection center with respect to the set of observed infected nodes. In other words, the sample path based estimator minimizes the maximum distance to observed infected nodes. We further prove that the distance between the estimator and the actual source is upper bounded by a constant independent of the number of infected nodes with a high probability on infinite trees. Our simulations on tree networks and real world networks show that the sample path based estimator is closer to the actual source than several other algorithms. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting multiple information sources in networks under the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. First, assuming the number of information sources is known, we develop a sample-path-based algorithm, named clustering and localization, for trees. For g-regular trees, the estimators produced by the proposed algorithm are within a constant distance from the real sources with a high probability. We further present a heuristic algorithm for general networks and an algorithm for estimating the number of sources when the number of real sources is unknown. The study of social networks, and in particular the spread of disease on networks, has attracted considerable recent attention in the physics community. In this paper, we show that a large class of standard epidemiological models, the so-called susceptible infective removed (SIR) models can be solved exactly on a wide variety of networks. In addition to the standard but unrealistic case of fixed infectiveness time and fixed and uncorrelated probability of transmission between all pairs of individuals, we solve cases in which times and probabilities are nonuniform and correlated. We also consider one simple case of an epidemic in a structured population, that of a sexually transmitted disease in a population divided into men and women. We confirm the correctness of our exact solutions with numerical simulations of SIR epidemics on networks.