Finding an infection source under the SIS model

Abstract

We consider the problem of identifying an infection source based only on an observed set of infected nodes in a network, assuming that the infection process follows a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model. We derive an estimator based on estimating the most likely infection source associated with the most likely infection path. Simulation results on regular trees suggest that our estimator performs consistently better than the minimum distance centrality based heuristic.