FFrankyy/FINDER

Finding an optimal set of nodes, called key players, whose activation (or removal) would maximally enhance (or degrade) certain network functionality, is a fundamental class of problems in network science. Potential applications include network immunization, epidemic control, drug design, and viral marketing. Due to their general NP-hard nature, those problems typically cannot be solved by exact algorithms with polynomial time complexity. Many approximate and heuristic strategies have been proposed to deal with specific application scenarios. Yet, we still lack a unified framework to efficiently solve this class of problems.