Issue |
EPL
Volume 118, Number 6, June 2017
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 68002 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/118/68002 | |
Published online | 11 August 2017 |
Ranking influential spreaders is an ill-defined problem
1 Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University - 440-746 Suwon, Republic of Korea
2 Department of Computer Science, Aalto University - FI-00076 Aalto, Finland
3 Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology - Tokyo, Japan
Received: 12 July 2017
Accepted: 27 July 2017
Finding influential spreaders of information and disease in networks is an important theoretical problem, and one of considerable recent interest. It has been almost exclusively formulated as a node-ranking problem —methods for identifying influential spreaders output a ranking of the nodes. In this work, we show that such a greedy heuristic does not necessarily work: the set of most influential nodes depends on the number of nodes in the set. Therefore, the set of n most important nodes to vaccinate does not need to have any node in common with the set of n + 1 most important nodes. We propose a method for quantifying the extent and impact of this phenomenon. By this method, we show that it is a common phenomenon in both empirical and model networks.
PACS: 89.75.-k – Complex systems / 05.40.-a – Fluctuation phenomena, random processes, noise, and Brownian motion / 89.75.Fb – Structures and organization in complex systems
© EPLA, 2017
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