Abstract:

We discuss two recent results concerning disease modeling on networks. The infection is assumed to spread via contagion (e.g., transmission over the edges of an underlying network). In the first scenario, we observe the infection status of individuals at a particular time instance and the goal is to identify a confidence set of nodes that contain the source of the infection with high probability. We show that when the underlying graph is a tree with certain regularity properties and the structure of the graph is known, confidence sets may be constructed with cardinality independent of the size of the infection set. In the second scenario, the goal is to infer the network structure of the underlying graph based on knowledge of the infected individuals. We develop a hypothesis test based on permutation testing, and describe a sufficient condition for the validity of the hypothesis test based on automorphism groups of the graphs involved in the hypothesis test. This is joint work with Justin Khim (UPenn).