When susceptible-infectious-susceptible contagion meets time-varying networks with identical infectivity

Adaptive Networks and Control Lab., Department of Electronic Engineering, Fudan University Shanghai 200433, PRC

^(a) lix@fudan.edu.cn

Received: 10 July 2014
Accepted: 7 October 2014

Abstract

Transmission of infectious diseases among populations can be modelled as contagion processes on contact networks. These contact networks are highly evolved in time and are represented by time-varying networks. The agents in contagion processes may have finite infectivity independently of their connectivity. Here we present an analytical framework of the susceptible-infectious-susceptible contagion process on time-varying networks, namely activity-driven networks with identical infectivity. We derive the critical epidemic thresholds and immunization thresholds as a function of infectivity, and prove that targeted immunizations are more efficient than random immunizations independently of the infectivity. We validate our conclusions in a large-scale human indoor interaction data set. Finally, we assess the effects of finite size.