KDD2016 paper 920

Title: Reconstructing an Epidemic over Time

Authors:
Polina Rozenshtein, Aalto University
Aristides Gionis*, Aalto University
B. Aditya Prakash, Virginia Tech
Jilles Vreeken, Max-Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University

Abstract:
We consider the problem of reconstructing an epidemic over time, or, more general, reconstructing the propagation of an activity in a network. Our input consists of a \emph{temporal network}, which contains information about when two nodes interacted, and a small sample of nodes that have been reported as infected. The goal is to recover the flow of the spread, including discovering the starting nodes, and identifying other likely-infected nodes that were not reported. This has multiple applications, from public health to social media and viral marketing purposes. Previous work explicitly factor-in many unrealistic assumptions: (a) the underlying network does not change or that we see all interactions; (b) that we have access to perfect noise-free data; or (c) that we know the exact propagation model. In contrast, we avoid these simplifications, and take into account the temporal network, require only a small sample of reported infections, and do not make any restrictive assumptions on the propagation model. We develop CulT, a scalable and effective algorithm to reconstruct epidemics that is also suited for an online setting. It works by formulating the problem as that of a temporal Steiner-tree computation, for which we design a fast algorithm leveraging the specific structure of our problem. We demonstrate the efficacy of CulT through extensive experiments on diverse datasets.

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