Issue |
EPL
Volume 99, Number 6, September 2012
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 68007 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/99/68007 | |
Published online | 08 October 2012 |
Identifying influential spreaders and efficiently estimating infection numbers in epidemic models: A walk counting approach
1 Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences - Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany, EU
2 CSIRO Information and Communications Technology Centre - PO Box 76, Epping, NSW 1710, Australia
(a) bauer@mis.mpg.de
(b) joseph.lizier@csiro.au
Received: 28 February 2012
Accepted: 3 September 2012
We introduce a new method to efficiently approximate the number of infections resulting from a given initially infected node in a network of susceptible individuals. Our approach is based on counting the number of possible infection walks of various lengths to each other node in the network. We analytically study the properties of our method, in particular demonstrating different forms for SIS and SIR disease spreading (e.g., under the SIR model our method counts self-avoiding walks). In comparison to existing methods to infer the spreading efficiency of different nodes in the network (based on degree, k-shell decomposition analysis and different centrality measures), our method directly considers the spreading process and, as such, is unique in providing estimation of actual numbers of infections. Crucially, in simulating infections on various real-world networks with the SIR model, we show that our walks-based method improves the inference of the effectiveness of nodes over a wide range of infection rates compared to existing methods. We also analyse the trade-off between estimate accuracy and computational cost, showing that the better accuracy here can still be obtained at a comparable computational cost to other methods.
PACS: 87.23.Ge – Dynamics of social systems / 89.75.-k – Complex systems / 64.60.ah – Percolation
© EPLA, 2012
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