Identifying Multiple Propagation Sources

The global diffusion of epidemics, computer viruses and rumors causes great damage to our society. One critical issue to identify the multiple diffusion sources so as to timely quarantine them. However, most methods proposed so far are unsuitable for diffusion with multiple sources because of the high computational cost and the complex spatiotemporal diffusion processes. In this chapter, we introduce an effective method to identify multiple diffusion sources, which can address three main issues in this area: (1) How many sources are there? (2) Where did the diffusion emerge? (3) When did the diffusion break out? For simplicity, we use rumor source identification to present the approach.