Ranking of Nodal Infection Probability in Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible Epidemic

• Main Authors: Bo Qu, Cong Li, Piet Van Mieghem, Huijuan Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2017-08-01
• Series: Scientific Reports
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-08611-9

Abstract The prevalence, which is the average fraction of infected nodes, has been studied to evaluate the robustness of a network subject to the spread of epidemics. We explore the vulnerability (infection probability) of each node in the metastable state with a given effective infection rate τ. Specifically, we investigate the ranking of the nodal vulnerability subject to a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic, motivated by the fact that the ranking can be crucial for a network operator to assess which nodes are more vulnerable. Via both theoretical and numerical approaches, we unveil that the ranking of nodal vulnerability tends to change more significantly as τ varies when τ is smaller or in Barabási-Albert than Erdős-Rényi random graphs.