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Cost effective approach to identify multiple influential spreaders based on the cycle structure in networks

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Abstract

Identifying influential spreaders has theoretical and practical significance in complex networks. Traditional centrality methods can efficiently find a single spreader, but it could lead to influence redundancy and high initializing costs when used to identify a set of multiple spreaders. A cycle structure is one of the most crucial reasons for the complexity of a network and the cornerstone of the feedback effect. From this novel perspective, we propose a new method based on basic cycles in networks to identify multiple influential spreaders with superior spreading performance and low initializing costs. Experiments on six empirical networks show that the spreaders selected by the proposed method are more scattered in the network and yield the best spreading performance compared with those on seven well-known methods. Importantly, the proposed method is the most cost effective under the same spreading performance. The cycle-based method has the advantage of generating multiple solutions. Our work provides new insights into identifying multiple spreaders and hence can benefit wide applications in practical scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. T2293771), STI 2030-Major Projects (Grant No. 2022ZD0211400), and the New Cornerstone Science Foundation through the XPLORER PRIZE.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Wenfeng Shi, Shuqi Xu & Linyuan Lü

  2. Institute of Dataspace, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, 230088, China

    Shuqi Xu

  3. Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, 1700, Switzerland

    Tianlong Fan

  4. Alibaba Research Center for Complexity Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 311121, China

    Tianlong Fan

Authors
  1. Wenfeng Shi
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  2. Shuqi Xu
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  3. Tianlong Fan
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  4. Linyuan Lü
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Shuqi Xu or Linyuan Lü.

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Appendixes A–D. The supporting information is available online at info.scichina.com and link.springer.com. The supporting materials are published as submitted, without typesetting or editing. The responsibility for scientific accuracy and content remains entirely with the authors.

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Shi, W., Xu, S., Fan, T. et al. Cost effective approach to identify multiple influential spreaders based on the cycle structure in networks. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 66, 192203 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-022-3715-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-022-3715-4

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