  Identifying the infection sources in a network, including the index cases
that introduce a contagious disease into a population network, the servers that
inject a computer virus into a computer network, or the individuals who started
a rumor in a social network, plays a critical role in limiting the damage
caused by the infection through timely quarantine of the sources. We consider
the problem of estimating the infection sources and the infection regions
(subsets of nodes infected by each source) in a network, based only on
knowledge of which nodes are infected and their connections, and when the
number of sources is unknown a priori. We derive estimators for the infection
sources and their infection regions based on approximations of the infection
sequences count. We prove that if there are at most two infection sources in a
geometric tree, our estimator identifies the true source or sources with
probability going to one as the number of infected nodes increases. When there
are more than two infection sources, and when the maximum possible number of
infection sources is known, we propose an algorithm with quadratic complexity
to estimate the actual number and identities of the infection sources.
Simulations on various kinds of networks, including tree networks, small-world
networks and real world power grid networks, and tests on two real data sets
are provided to verify the performance of our estimators.
