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research article

The power of adaptivity in source identification with time queries on the path

Lecomte, Victor
•
Odor, Gergely  
•
Thiran, Patrick  
April 8, 2022
Theoretical Computer Science

We study the problem of identifying the source of a stochastic diffusion process spreading on a graph based on the arrival times of the diffusion at a few queried nodes. In a graph $G=(V,E)$, an unknown source node $v^* \in V$ is drawn uniformly at random, and unknown edge weights $w(e)$ for $e\in E$, representing the propagation delays along the edges, are drawn independently from a Gaussian distribution of mean $1$ and variance $\sigma^2$. An algorithm then attempts to identify $v^$ by querying nodes $q \in V$ and being told the length of the shortest path between $q$ and $v^$ in graph $G$ weighted by $w$. We consider two settings: \emph{non-adaptive}, in which all query nodes must be decided in advance, and \emph{adaptive}, in which each query can depend on the results of the previous ones. Both settings are motivated by an application of the problem to epidemic processes (where the source is called patient zero), which we discuss in detail. We characterize the query complexity when $G$ is an $n$-node path. In the non-adaptive setting, $\Theta(n\sigma^2)$ queries are needed for $\sigma^2 \leq 1$, and $\Theta(n)$ for $\sigma^2 \geq 1$. In the adaptive setting, somewhat surprisingly, only $\Theta(\log\log_{1/\sigma}n)$ are needed when $\sigma^2 \leq 1/2$, and $\Theta(\log \log n)+O_\sigma(1)$ when $\sigma^2 \geq 1/2$. This is the first mathematical study of source identification with time queries in a non-deterministic diffusion process.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.tcs.2022.02.008
Author(s)
Lecomte, Victor
Odor, Gergely  
Thiran, Patrick  
Date Issued

2022-04-08

Published in
Theoretical Computer Science
Volume

911

Start page

92

End page

123

Subjects

Graph algorithms

•

Source location

•

Noisy information

•

Lower bounds

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
INDY2  
FunderGrant Number

Swiss federal funding

SNSF 200021-182407

Available on Infoscience
May 11, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/187841
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