Diffusion characteristics classification framework for identification of diffusion source in complex networks

The diffusion phenomena taking place in complex networks are usually modelled as diffusion process, such as the diffusion of diseases, rumors and viruses. Identification of diffusion source is crucial for developing strategies to control these harmful diffusion processes. At present, accurately identifying the diffusion source is still an opening challenge. In this paper, we define a kind of diffusion characteristics that is composed of the diffusion direction and time information of observers, and propose a neural networks based diffusion characteristics classification framework (NN-DCCF) to identify the source. The NN-DCCF contains three stages. First, the diffusion characteristics are utilized to construct network snapshot feature. Then, a graph LSTM auto-encoder is proposed to convert the network snapshot feature into low-dimension representation vectors. Further, a source classification neural network is proposed to identify the diffusion source by classifying the representation vectors. With NN-DCCF, the identification of diffusion source is converted into a classification problem. Experiments are performed on a series of synthetic and real networks. The results show that the NN-DCCF is feasible and effective in accurately identifying the diffusion source.