Shui-Nee Chow

Shui-Nee Chow, Xiaojing Ye, Hongyuan Zha et al.

We consider the problem of predicting the time evolution of influence, the expected number of activated nodes, given a set of initially active nodes on a propagation network. To address the significant computational challenges of this problem on large-scale heterogeneous networks, we establish a system of differential equations governing the dynamics of probability mass functions on the state graph where the nodes each lumps a number of activation states of the network, which can be considered as an analogue to the Fokker-Planck equation in continuous space. We provides several methods to estimate the system parameters which depend on the identities of the initially active nodes, network topology, and activation rates etc. The influence is then estimated by the solution of such a system of differential equations. This approach gives rise to a class of novel and scalable algorithms that work effectively for large-scale and dense networks. Numerical results are provided to show the very promising performance in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency of this approach.

Shui-Nee Chow, Luca Dieci, Wuchen Li et al.

We propose a new semi-discretization scheme to approximate nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations, by exploiting the gradient flow structures with respect to the 2-Wasserstein metric. We discretize the underlying state by a finite graph and define a discrete 2-Wasserstein metric. Based on such metric, we introduce a dynamical system, which is a gradient flow of the discrete free energy. We prove that the new scheme maintains dissipativity of the free energy and converges to a discrete Gibbs measure at exponential (dissipation) rate. We exhibit these properties on several numerical examples.