centrality_rumor: Rumor Centrality

In cograph: Analysis and Visualization of Complex Networks

Rumor Centrality

Description

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.

Usage

centrality_rumor(x, ...)

Arguments

x	Network input (matrix, igraph, network, cograph_network, tna object).
...	Additional arguments passed to centrality.

Details

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.

Value

Named numeric vector, \log R per node.

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.

Examples

path5 <- matrix(0, 5, 5)
path5[cbind(1:4, 2:5)] <- 1; path5 <- path5 + t(path5)
rownames(path5) <- colnames(path5) <- LETTERS[1:5]
exp(centrality_rumor(path5))   # spreading orders from each node

cograph documentation built on Sept. 30, 2026, 5:08 p.m.