Shah and Zaman's (2010, 2011) maximum-likelihood score for the source of
a rumor that has spread under the susceptible-infected model to every
node. On a tree,
$$R(v) = \frac{N!}{\prod_{u} T^v_u},$$
where \(T^v_u\) is the number of nodes in the subtree rooted at
\(u\) when the tree is rooted at \(v\): the number of spreading
orders that could have started at \(v\). On a general graph the paper
evaluates \(R\) on the breadth-first tree rooted at each node (its
eq. 24). Higher values mark nodes that are more plausible origins, which
in practice are nodes near the center of the network.
The value is returned as \(\log R(v)\) (natural log) because
\(N!\) overflows beyond 170 nodes; rankings and differences are
unchanged. \(N\) is the size of the node's component, so a
disconnected graph is scored component by component and an isolate
scores 0. The breadth-first tree attaches each node to the earliest
discovered node of the previous layer, scanning neighbors in label
order; the paper does not fix a tie rule, and this one reproduces its
Figure 3. Direction and edge weights are ignored.
Validated on trees against a brute-force count of spreading orders and
against the worked examples in the paper.
References
Shah, D., & Zaman, T. (2010). Detecting sources of computer viruses in
networks: theory and experiment. ACM SIGMETRICS, 203-214.
Shah, D., & Zaman, T. (2011). Rumors in a network: Who's the culprit?
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 57(8), 5163-5181.
See Also
centrality for computing multiple measures at once.