Better Bounds for Coalescing-Branching Random Walks

Abstract

Coalescing-branching random walks, or cobra walks for short, are a natural variant of random walks on graphs that can model the spread of disease through contacts or the spread of information in networks. In a k -cobra walk, at each timestep, a subset of the vertices are active; each active vertex chooses k random neighbors (sampled independently and uniformly with replacement) that become active at the next step, and these are the only active vertices at the next step. A natural quantity to study for cobra walks is the cover time, which corresponds to the expected time when all nodes have become infected or received the disseminated information.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 31, 2018
Source ID
10.1145/3209688

Entities

People

  • Michael Mitzenmacher
  • Rajmohan Rajaraman
  • Scott Roche

Organizations

  • Akamai Technologies
  • Harvard University
  • National Science Foundation
  • Northeastern University
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Graph Algorithms and Convex Optimization.
  • Parasitology and Pharmacology of Malaria.