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The prevention and control of communicable diseases such as COVID-19 has been a worldwide problem, especially in terms of mining towards latent spreading paths. Although some communication models have been proposed from the perspective of spreading mechanism, it remains hard to describe spreading mechanism anytime. Because real-world communication scenarios of disease spreading are always dynamic, which cannot be described by time-invariant model parameters, to remedy such gap, this paper explores the utilization of big data analysis into this area, so as to replace mechanism-driven methods with big data-driven methods. In modern society with high digital level, the increasingly growing amount of data in various fields also provide much convenience for this purpose. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent knowledge discovery method for critical spreading paths based on epidemic big data. For the major roadmap, a directional acyclic graph of epidemic spread was constructed with each province and city in mainland China as nodes, all features of the same node are dimension-reduced, and a composite score is evaluated for each city per day by processing the features after principal component analysis. Then, the typical machine learning model named XGBoost carries out processing of feature importance ranking to discriminate latent candidate spreading paths. Finally, the shortest path algorithm is used as the basis to find the critical path of epidemic spreading between two nodes. Besides, some simulative experiments are implemented with use of realistic social network data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]