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The problem of estimating event truths from conflicting agent opinions in a social network is investigated. An autoencoder learns the complex relationships between event truths, agent reliabilities and agent observations. A Bayesian network model is proposed to guide the learning process by modeling the relationship of the autoencoder's outputs with different variables. At the same time, it also models the social relationships between agents in the network. The proposed approach is unsupervised and is applicable when ground truth labels of events are unavailable. A variational inference method is used to jointly estimate the hidden variables in the Bayesian network and the parameters in the autoencoder. Experiments on three real datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach is competitive with, and in most cases better than, several state-of-the-art benchmark methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding the infection sources in a network when we only know the network topology and infected nodes, but not the rates of infection, is a challenging combinatorial problem, and it is even more difficult in practice where the underlying infection spreading model is usually unknown a priori. In this paper, we are interested in finding a source estimator that is applicable to various spreading models, including the susceptible–infected (SI), susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR), susceptible–infected–recovered–infected (SIRI), and susceptible–infected–susceptible (SIS) models. We show that under the SI, SIR, and SIRI spreading models and with mild technical assumptions, the Jordan center is the infection source associated with the most likely infection path in a tree network with a single infection source. This conclusion applies for a wide range of spreading parameters, while it holds for regular trees under the SIS model with homogeneous infection and recovery rates. Since the Jordan center does not depend on the infection, recovery, and reinfection rates, it can be regarded as a universal source estimator. We also consider the case where there are $k>1$ infection sources, generalize the Jordan center definition to a $k$ -Jordan center set, and show that this is an optimal infection source set estimator in a tree network for the SI model. Simulation results on various general synthetic networks and real-world networks suggest that Jordan center-based estimators consistently outperform the betweenness, closeness, distance, degree, eigenvector, and pagerank centrality-based heuristics, even if the network is not a tree. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Identifying the infection sources in a network, including the index cases that introduce a contagious disease into a population network, the servers that inject a computer virus into a computer network, or the individuals who started a rumor in a social network, plays a critical role in limiting the damage caused by the infection through timely quarantine of the sources. We consider the problem of estimating the infection sources and the infection regions (subsets of nodes infected by each source) in a network, based only on knowledge of which nodes are infected and their connections, and when the number of sources is unknown a priori. We derive estimators for the infection sources and their infection regions based on approximations of the infection sequences count. We prove that if there are at most two infection sources in a geometric tree, our estimator identifies the true source or sources with probability going to one as the number of infected nodes increases. When there are more than two infection sources, and when the maximum possible number of infection sources is known, we propose an algorithm with quadratic complexity to estimate the actual number and identities of the infection sources. Simulations on various kinds of networks, including tree networks, small-world networks and real world power grid networks, and tests on two real data sets are provided to verify the performance of our estimators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]