Perspective on the spatio-temporal spread of epidemics in metapopulation networks

¹ School of Computer Science, Southwest Petroleum University - Chengdu 610500, China
² School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong - Hong Kong 999077, China
³ School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications - Beijing 100876, China
⁴ D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University - Boston, MA, USA
⁵ Computational Communication Research Center, Beijing Normal University - Zhuhai 519087, China
⁶ School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics, Northwestern Polytechnical University - Xi'an, China
⁷ Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge - Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK
⁸ Institute of Complex Networks and Intelligent Systems, Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University - Shanghai 201210, China

^(a) E-mail: lw660@cam.ac.uk (corresponding author)
^(b) E-mail: lix2021@tongji.edu.cn (corresponding author)

Received: 31 July 2023
Accepted: 18 September 2023

Abstract

We review the recent progress of epidemic dynamics in metapopulation networks. Firstly, we give an introduction of the concepts about epidemic models and metapopulation network. Then, the theoretical characterization of epidemics spread in metapopulation networks is summed up. The measures of how to curb the spread of epidemics are summarized. The applications of inferring epidemic pathways based on epidemic data and reconstruction of epidemic transmission by phylogeographic are introduced. Finally, we present the outlooks about further research of epidemic dynamics on metapopulation networks.