The article “Active querying approach to epidemic source detection on contact networks” has been published in Nature Scientific Reports by DDIS alumni Dr. Martin Sterchi in collaboration with Lorenz Hilfiker, Rolf Grütter & Abraham Bernstein!

The paper’s problem of interest is the identification of an epidemic’s patient zero given a network of contacts and a set of infected individuals, under the assumptions that the infection states of only a few individuals are initially observed and the epidemic has evolved. To tackle this issue, they formulate the problem as an active querying problem and propose a number of active querying strategies inspired by active learning. Their results suggest that in the limited information scenario it is possible to achieve source inference performance comparable to when the infection states of all individuals are observed.