论文标题
通过精确的多目标优化成本和屏蔽价值,以防止网络上流行的多个节点免疫
Multiple Node Immunisation for Preventing Epidemics on Networks by Exact Multiobjective Optimisation of Cost and Shield-Value
论文作者
论文摘要
本文中的一般问题是顶点(节点)子集选择,其目标是包含在网络中传播的感染。本文没有选择最重要的节点,而是讨论了选择多个节点以删除的问题。与以前在多节点选择方面的工作相比,考虑成本和收益之间的权衡。利益是根据增加流行阈值来衡量的,这是感染在网络中传播的困难。成本是根据要删除或控制的节点的数量和大小来衡量的。已经在其单目标实例中,要删除固定数量的$ k $节点,多个顶点免疫问题已被证明是NP-HARD。已经开发了几种启发式方法来近似问题。在这项工作中,我们将元武器技术与屏蔽价值上的精确方法进行了比较,这是最大特征值的亚模型代表,并用于当前最新的贪婪节点解释策略。我们将其推广到多目标情况下,并通过二次程序(QP)替换贪婪的算法,然后可以用精确的QP求解器解决该算法。本文的主要贡献是,如果时间允许,应使用精确和特定问题的方法近似,这通常比一般的元脑术获得的帕累托前近似值要好得多。基于这些,制定控制现实世界网络的策略将在预防或遏制流行病爆发时更有效。本文可以通过准备使用优化方法和数据集的Python实现来支持本文。
The general problem in this paper is vertex (node) subset selection with the goal to contain an infection that spreads in a network. Instead of selecting the single most important node, this paper deals with the problem of selecting multiple nodes for removal. As compared to previous work on multiple-node selection, the trade-off between cost and benefit is considered. The benefit is measured in terms of increasing the epidemic threshold which is a measure of how difficult it is for an infection to spread in a network. The cost is measured in terms of the number and size of nodes to be removed or controlled. Already in its single-objective instance with a fixed number of $k$ nodes to be removed, the multiple vertex immunisation problems have been proven to be NP-hard. Several heuristics have been developed to approximate the problem. In this work, we compare meta-heuristic techniques with exact methods on the Shield-value, which is a sub-modular proxy for the maximal eigenvalue and used in the current state-of-the-art greedy node-removal strategies. We generalise it to the multi-objective case and replace the greedy algorithm by a quadratic program (QP), which then can be solved with exact QP solvers. The main contribution of this paper is the insight that, if time permits, exact and problem-specific methods approximation should be used, which are often far better than Pareto front approximations obtained by general meta-heuristics. Based on these, it will be more effective to develop strategies for controlling real-world networks when the goal is to prevent or contain epidemic outbreaks. This paper is supported by ready to use Python implementation of the optimization methods and datasets.