| Summary: | Locating the source that undergoes a diffusion-like process is a fundamental and challenging problem in complex network, which can help inhibit the outbreak of epidemics among humans, suppress the spread of rumors on the Internet, prevent cascading failures of power grids, etc. However, our ability to accurately locate the diffusion source is strictly limited by incomplete information of nodes and inevitable randomness of diffusion process. In this paper, we propose an efficient optimization approach via maximum likelihood estimation to locate the diffusion source in complex networks with limited observations. By modeling the informed times of the observers, we derive an optimal source localization solution for arbitrary trees and then extend it to general graphs via proper approximations. The numerical analyses on synthetic networks and real networks all indicate that our method is superior to several benchmark methods in terms of the average localization accuracy, high-precision localization and approximate area localization. In addition, low computational cost enables our method to be widely applied for the source localization problem in large-scale networks. We believe that our work can provide valuable insights on the interplay between information diffusion and source localization in complex networks.
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