Rumour Source Detection in Social Networks using Partial Observations

The spread of information on graphs has been extensively studied in engineering, biology, and economics. Recently, however, several authors have started to address the more challenging inverse problem, of localizing the origin of an epidemic, given observed traces of infection. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to estimate the location of a source of multiple epidemics on a general graph, assuming knowledge of the start times of rumours, and using observations from a small number of monitors.