Cost-effective Network Disintegration through Targeted Enumeration

Although we are in a hyper-connected world, this connectivity has undesirable aspects in nature and society. Finding an optimal subset of nodes or links to disintegrate harmful networks is a fundamental problem in network science, with potential applications to anti-terrorist, epidemic control, and many other fields. The challenge of the network disintegration problem is to balance the effectiveness and efficiency of strategies. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective targeted enumeration method for network disintegration. Our approach includes two stages: searching the candidate objects and identifying the optimal solution. In the first stage, we employ the rank aggregation method to generate a comprehensive node importance ranking, based on which we determine a small-scale candidate set of nodes to remove. In the second stage, we use the enumeration method to find the optimal combination among the candidate nodes. The extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate that our method achieves a satisfying trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. The introduced two-stage targeted enumeration framework can be further extended to other combinational optimization problems.