Node Immunization with Time-Sensitive Restrictions

Sensors (Basel). 2016 Dec 15;16(12):2141. doi: 10.3390/s16122141.

Abstract

When we encounter a malicious rumor or an infectious disease outbreak, immunizing k nodes of the relevant network with limited resources is always treated as an extremely effective method. The key challenge is how we can insulate limited nodes to minimize the propagation of those contagious things. In previous works, the best k immunised nodes are selected by learning the initial status of nodes and their strategies even if there is no feedback in the propagation process, which eventually leads to ineffective performance of their solutions. In this paper, we design a novel vaccines placement strategy for protecting much more healthy nodes from being infected by infectious nodes. The main idea of our solution is that we are not only utilizing the status of changing nodes as auxiliary knowledge to adjust our scheme, but also comparing the performance of vaccines in various transmission slots. Thus, our solution has a better chance to get more benefit from these limited vaccines. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several real-world data sets and the results have shown that our algorithm has a better performance than previous works.

Keywords: node immunization; social network; strategy.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Communicable Diseases / immunology
  • Disease Resistance
  • Disease Susceptibility
  • Humans
  • Immunization*
  • Models, Biological
  • Time Factors
  • Vaccines / immunology
  • Virus Diseases / immunology
  • Virus Diseases / transmission

Substances

  • Vaccines