Gelling, and melting, large graphs by edge manipulation

Abstract

Controlling the dissemination of an entity (e.g., meme, virus, etc) on a large graph is an interesting problem in many disciplines. Examples include epidemiology, computer security, marketing, etc. So far, previous studies have mostly focused on removing or inoculating nodes to achieve the desired outcome. We shift the problem to the level of edges and ask: which edges should we add or delete in order to speed-up or contain a dissemination? First, we propose effective and scalable algorithms to solve these dissemination problems. Second, we conduct a theoretical study of the two problems and our methods, including the hardness of the problem, the accuracy and complexity of our methods, and the equivalence between the different strategies and problems. Third and lastly, we conduct experiments on real topologies of varying sizes to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approaches. © 2012 ACM.