Understanding how and how far information, behaviors, or pathogens spread in social networks is an important problem, having implications for both predicting the size of epidemics, as well as for planning effective interventions. There are, however, two main challenges for inferring spreading paths in real-world networks. One is the practical difficulty of observing a dynamic process on a netwo...

We study and solve a particular stochastic version of the Restricted Shortest Path Problem, the Stochastic Shortest Path Problem with Delay Excess Penalty. While arc costs are kept deterministic, arc delays are assumed to be normally distributed and a penalty per time unit occurs whenever the given delay constraint is not satisfied. The objective is to minimize the sum of path cost and total de...

We present a modification of the Real-Time Dynamic Programming (rtdp) algorithm that makes it a genuine off-line algorithm for solving Stochastic Shortest-Path problems. Also, a new domainindependent and admissible heuristic is presented for Stochastic Shortest-Path problems. The new algorithm and heuristic are compared with Value Iteration over benchmark problems with large state spaces. The r...