Spectral bounds for independent cascade model with sensitive edges

Abstract

This paper studies independent cascade models where influence propagates from seed-nodes along edges with independent probabilities. Upper-bounds for the expected number of influenced nodes were previously proposed using the spectral norm of a Hazard matrix. However, these bounds turn out loose in many cases, in particular with respect to sensitive edges such as bottlenecks, seed adjacent, and high probability edges. This paper proposes a similar bound that improves in such cases by handling sensitives edges more carefully.