[Complex Networks Conference 2020: Contagion Blocking]

Blocking the Propagation of Two Simultaneous

Contagions over Networks

Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65347-7_38

Authors: Carscadden, Kuhlman, Ravi, and Rosenkranz.

Abstract: We consider the simultaneous propagation of two contagions over a social network. We assume a threshold model for the propagation of the two contagions and use the formal framework of discrete dynamical systems. In particular, we study an optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the total number of infected nodes subject to a budget constraint on the total number of nodes that can be vaccinated. While this problem has been considered in the literature for a single contagion, our work considers the simultaneous propagation of two contagions. Since the optimization problem is NP-hard, we develop a heuristic based on a generalization of the set cover problem. Using experiments on three real-world networks, we compare the performance of the heuristic with some baseline methods.