An Independent Cascade Model of Graph Burning

Abstract

Graph burning was introduced to simulate the spreading of news/information/rumors in social networks. The symmetric undirected graph is considered here. That is, vertex u can spread the information to vertex v, and symmetrically vertex v can also spread information to vertex u. When it is modeled as a graph burning process, a vertex can be set on fire directly or burned by its neighbor. Thus, the task is to find the minimum sequence of vertices chosen as sources of fire to burn the entire graph. This problem has been proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, from a new perspective, we introduce a generalized model called the Independent Cascade Graph Burning model, where a vertex v can be burned by one of its burning neighbors u only if the influence that u gives to v is larger than a given threshold β≥0. We determine the graph burning number with this new Independent Cascade Graph Burning model for several graphs and operation graphs and also discuss its upper and lower bounds.