An information source identification algorithm based on shortest arborescence of network

It is of significance to identify the source of malicious information in social networks, since this information diffusion is already a problem, which can seriously affect social stability. In this paper, we develop a propagation path based approach where the estimator of information source is chosen to be the root node associated with the propagation path that most likely leads to the monitored state of network. When the information diffusion process follows the Susceptible-Infected (SI) model and satisfying the instant forwarding hypothesis, we proved that the source estimator we proposed is the root node of the network shortest arborescence. Finally, multiple simulations on networks with different structure show that our method outperforms existing algorithms.