Source Localization in Networks: Trees and Beyond

Abstract: 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 problem is to identify a node in the network that provides the best explanation of the observed diffusion. Despite significant efforts and successes over last few years, theoretical guarantees of source localization algorithms were established only for tree networks due to the complexity of the problem. This paper presents a new source localization algorithm, called the Short-Fat Tree (SFT) algorithm. Loosely speaking, the algorithm selects the node such that the breadth-first search (BFS) tree from the node has the minimum depth but the maximum number of leaf nodes. Performance guarantees of SFT under the independent cascade (IC) model are established for both tree networks and the Erdos-Renyi (ER) random graph. On tree networks, SFT is the maximum a posterior (MAP) estimator. On the ER random graph, the following fundamental limits have been obtained: $(i)$ when the infection duration $<\frac{2}{3}t_u,$ SFT identifies the source with probability one asymptotically, where $t_u=\left\lceil\frac{\log n}{\log \mu}\right\rceil+2$ and $\mu$ is the average node degree, $(ii)$ when the infection duration $>t_u,$ the probability of identifying the source approaches zero asymptotically under any algorithm; and $(iii)$ when infection duration $<t_u,$ the BFS tree starting from the source is a fat tree. Numerical experiments on tree networks, the ER random graphs and real world networks with different evaluation metrics show that the SFT algorithm outperforms existing algorithms.