Average reachability: A new metric to estimate epidemic growth considering the network structure and epidemic severity

It is a fundamental issue to find a small subset of individuals in a complex network such that their immunization (i.e. removal) minimizes epidemic growth in the network. Though some network topological metrics have been proposed to estimate the effect of individual immunization or epidemic growth o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bita Shams, Mohammad Khansari
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences 2019-09-01
Series:Network Biology
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.iaees.org/publications/journals/nb/articles/2019-9(3)/average-reachability-A-new-metric-to-estimate-epidemic-growth.pdf
Description
Summary:It is a fundamental issue to find a small subset of individuals in a complex network such that their immunization (i.e. removal) minimizes epidemic growth in the network. Though some network topological metrics have been proposed to estimate the effect of individual immunization or epidemic growth of the network, none of them considered the severity of the current epidemic. This paper proposes a new metric, called average reachability (AR) to estimate epidemic growth in a network. AR incorporates infection rate of epidemics to make a trade-off between network local connectivity and global reachability. Moreover, we intend to generalize stochastic hill-climbing immunization (SHCI) algorithm to minimize network epidemic growth regarding all estimation criteria. SIR simulation on immunized networks shows that the combination of AR and SHCI results in minimal epidemic growth compared to immunization algorithms that minimize density or sum of square partitions.
ISSN:2220-8879
2220-8879