A Greedy Monitoring Station Selection for Rumor Source Detection in Online Social Networks

In monitoring station observation, for the best accuracy of rumor source detection, it is important to deploy monitors appropriately into the network. There are, however, a very limited number of studies on the monitoring station selection. This article will study the problem of detecting a single rumormonger based on an observation of selected infection monitoring stations in a complete snapshot taken at some time in an online social network (OSN) following the independent cascade (IC) model. To deploy monitoring stations into the observed network, we propose an influence-distance-based
$k$
-station selection method where the influence distance is a conceptual measurement that estimates the probability that a rumor-infected node can influence its uninfected neighbors. Accordingly, a greedy algorithm is developed to find the best
$k$
monitoring stations among all rumor-infected nodes with a 2-approximation. Based on the infection path, which is most likely toward the
$k$
infection monitoring stations, we derive that an estimator for the “most like” rumor source under the IC model is the Jordan infection center in a graph. Our theoretical analysis is presented in the article. The effectiveness of our method is verified through experiments over both synthetic and real-world datasets. As shown in the results, our
$k$
-station selection method outperforms off-the-shelf methods in most cases in the network under the IC model.