Dynamical processes on time-varying complex networks are key to understanding and modeling a broad variety of processes in socio-technical systems. Here we focus on empirical temporal networks of human proximity and we aim at understanding the factors that, in simulation, shape the arrival time distribution of simple spreading processes. Abandoning the notion of wall-clock time in favour of node-specific clocks based on activity exposes robust statistical patterns in the arrival times across different social contexts. Using randomization strategies and generative models constrained by data, we show that these patterns can be understood in terms of heterogeneous inter-event time distributions coupled with heterogeneous numbers of events per edge. We also show, both empirically and by using a synthetic dataset, that significant deviations from the above behavior can be caused by the presence of edge classes with strong activity correlations.
Promoting information spreading is a booming research topic in network science community. However, the exiting studies about promoting information spreading seldom took into account the human memory, which plays an important role in the spreading dynamics. In this paper we propose a non-Markovian information spreading model on complex networks, in which every informed node contacts a neighbor by using the memory of neighbor's accumulated contact numbers in the past. We systematically study the information spreading dynamics on uncorrelated configuration networks and a group of $22$ real-world …
Using network-based information to facilitate information spreading is an essential task for spreading dynamics in complex networks, which will benefit the promotion of technical innovations, healthy behaviors, new products, etc. Focusing on degree correlated networks, we propose a preferential contact strategy based on the local network structure and local informed density to promote the information spreading. During the spreading process, an informed node will preferentially select a contact target among its neighbors, basing on their degrees or local informed densities. By extensively imple…
Disease, opinions, ideas, gossip, etc. all spread on social networks. How these networks are connected (the network structure) influences the dynamics of the spreading processes. By investigating these relationships one gains understanding both of the spreading itself and the structure and function of the contact network. In this chapter, we will summarize the recent literature using simulation of spreading processes on top of empirical contact data. We will mostly focus on disease simulations on temporal proximity networks -- networks recording who is close to whom, at what time -- but also c…
We study spreading on networks where the contact dynamics between the nodes is governed by a random process and where the inter-contact time distribution may differ from the exponential. We consider a process of imperfect spreading, where transmission is successful with a determined probability at each contact. We first derive an expression for the inter-success time distribution, determining the speed of the propagation, and then focus on a problem related to epidemic spreading, by estimating the epidemic threshold in a system where nodes remain infectious during a finite, random period of ti…
We study the epidemic spreading on spatial networks where the probability that two nodes are connected decays with their distance as a power law. As the exponent of the distance dependence grows, model networks smoothly transition from the random network limit to the regular lattice limit. We show that despite keeping the average number of contacts constant, the increasing exponent hampers the epidemic spreading by making long-distance connections less frequent. The spreading dynamics is influenced by the distance-dependence exponent as well and changes from exponential growth to power-law gro…
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the first epidemic in human history in which digital contact-tracing has been deployed at a global scale. Tracking and quarantining all the contacts of individuals who test positive to a virus can help slowing-down an epidemic, but the impact of contact-tracing is severely limited by the generally low adoption of contact-tracing apps in the population. We derive here an analytical expression for the effectiveness of contact-tracing app installation strategies in a SIR model on a given contact graph. We propose a decentralised heuristic to improve the effectiven…
An outstanding problem of interdisciplinary interest is to understand quantitatively the role of social contacts in contagion dynamics. In general, there are two types of contacts: close ones among friends, colleagues and family members, etc., and ordinary contacts from encounters with strangers. Typically, social reinforcement occurs for close contacts. Taking into account both types of contacts, we develop a contact-based model for social contagion. We find that, associated with the spreading dynamics, for random networks there is coexistence of continuous and discontinuous phase transitions…
Epidemic spreading on physical contact network will naturally introduce the human awareness information diffusion on virtual contact network, and the awareness diffusion will in turn depress the epidemic spreading, thus forming the competing spreading processes of epidemic and awareness in a multiplex networks. In this paper, we study the competing dynamics of epidemic and awareness, both of which follow the SIR process, in a two-layer networks based on microscopic Markov chain approach and numerical simulations. We find that strong capacities of awareness diffusion and self-protection of indi…
We present a contact-based model to study the spreading of epidemics by means of extending the dynamic message passing approach to temporal networks. The shift in perspective from node- to edge-centric quantities enables accurate modelling of Markovian susceptible-infected-recovered outbreaks on time-varying trees, i.e., temporal networks with a loop-free underlying topology. On arbitrary graphs, the proposed contact-based model incorporates potential structural and temporal heterogeneities of the underlying contact network and improves analytic estimations with respect to the individual-based…
Improved mobility not only contributes to more intensive human activities but also facilitates the spread of communicable disease, thus constituting a major threat to billions of urban commuters. In this study, we present a multi-city investigation of communicable diseases percolating among metro travelers. We use smart card data from three megacities in China to construct individual-level contact networks, based on which the spread of disease is modeled and studied. We observe that, though differing in urban forms, network layouts, and mobility patterns, the metro systems of the three cities …
The dynamics of many epidemic compartmental models for infectious diseases that spread in a single host population present a second-order phase transition. This transition occurs as a function of the infectivity parameter, from the absence of infected individuals to an endemic state. Here, we study this transition, from the perspective of dynamical systems, for a discrete-time compartmental epidemic model known as Microscopic Markov Chain Approach, whose applicability for forecasting future scenarios of epidemic spreading has been proved very useful during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that t…
In real social networks, person-to-person interactions are known to be heterogeneous, which can affect the way a disease spreads through a population, reaches a tipping point in the fraction of infected individuals, and becomes an epidemic. This property, called disorder, is usually associated with contact times between individuals and can be modeled by a weighted network, where the weights are related to normalized contact times $ω$. In this paper, we study the SIR model for disease spreading when both close and distant types of interactions are present. We develop a mitigation strategy that …
Contact tracing via digital tracking applications installed on mobile phones is an important tool for controlling epidemic spreading. Its effectivity can be quantified by modifying the standard methodology for analyzing percolation and connectivity of contact networks. We apply this framework to networks with varying degree distributions, numbers of application users, and probabilities of quarantine failures. Further, we study structured populations with homophily and heterophily and the possibility of degree-targeted application distribution. Our results are based on a combination of explicit…
Drug resistance and strong contacts actually play crucial roles in epidemic spread in complex systems. Nevertheless, neither theoretical model or methodology is proposed to address this. We thus consider an edge-based epidemic spread model considering the two key ingredients, in which the contacts are grouped into two classes: strong contacts and normal ones. Next, we present a unified edge-based compartmental approach to the spread dynamics on Erdös-Rényi (ER) networks and validate its results by extensive numerical simulations. In case that epidemic is totally drug-resistant, we both numeric…
We have two main aims in this paper. First we use theories of disease spreading on networks to look at the COVID-19 epidemic on the basis of individual contacts -- these give rise to predictions which are often rather different from the homogeneous mixing approaches usually used. Our second aim is to look at the role of social deprivation, again using networks as our basis, in the spread of this epidemic. We choose the city of Kolkata as a case study, but assert that the insights so obtained are applicable to a wide variety of urban environments which are densely populated and where social ine…
Human contact networks are constituted by a multitude of individuals and pairwise contacts among them. However, the dynamic nature, which generates the evolution of human contact networks, of contact patterns is not known yet. Here, we analyse three empirical datasets and identify two crucial mechanisms of the evolution of temporal human contact networks, i.e. the activity state transition laws for an individual to be socially active, and the contact establishment mechanism that active individuals adopt. We consider both of the two mechanisms to propose a temporal network model, named the memo…
Infectious diseases that incorporate pre-symptomatic transmission are challenging to monitor, model, predict and contain. We address this scenario by studying a variant of a stochastic susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model on arbitrary network instances using an analytical framework based on the method of dynamic message-passing. This framework provides a good estimate of the probabilistic evolution of the spread on both static and contact networks, offering a significantly improved accuracy with respect to individual-based mean-field approaches while requiring a much lower computationa…
We combine a pedestrian dynamics model with a contact tracing method to simulate the initial spreading of a highly infectious airborne disease in a confined environment. We focus on a medium size population (up to 1000 people) with a small number of infectious people (1 or 2) and the rest of the people is divided between immune and susceptible. We adopt a space-continuous model that represents pedestrian dynamics by the forces acting on them, i.e. a microscopic force-based model. Once discretized, the model results in a high-dimensional system of second order ordinary differential equations. B…
Human social behavior plays a crucial role in how pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 or fake news spread in a population. Social interactions determine the contact network among individuals, while spreading, requiring individual-to-individual transmission, takes place on top of the network. Studying the topological aspects of a contact network, therefore, not only has the potential of leading to valuable insights into how the behavior of individuals impacts spreading phenomena, but it may also open up possibilities for devising effective behavioral interventions. Because of the temporal nature of inter…
Passenger contact in public transit (PT) networks can be a key mediate in the spreading of infectious diseases. This paper proposes a time-varying weighted PT encounter network to model the spreading of infectious diseases through the PT systems. Social activity contacts at both local and global levels are also considered. We select the epidemiological characteristics of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a case study along with smart card data from Singapore to illustrate the model at the metropolitan level. A scalable and lightweight theoretical framework is derived to capture the time-v…
The COVID-19 infection cases have surged globally, causing devastations to both the society and economy. A key factor contributing to the sustained spreading is the presence of a large number of asymptomatic or hidden spreaders, who mix among the susceptible population without being detected or quarantined. Here we propose an effective non-pharmacological intervention method of detecting the asymptomatic spreaders in contact-tracing networks, and validated it on the empirical COVID-19 spreading network in Singapore. We find that using pure physical spreading equations, the hidden spreaders of …
The mobility patterns of individuals in China during the early outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic exhibit reversible changes -- in many regions, the mobility first decreased significantly and later restored. Based on this observation, here we study the classical SIR model on a particular type of time-varying network where the links undergo a freeze-recovery process. We first focus on an isolated network and find that the recovery mechanism could lead to the resurgence of an epidemic. The influence of link freezing on epidemic dynamics is subtle. In particular, we show that there is an optimal v…
The study proposes a modeling framework for investigating the disease dynamics with adaptive human behavior during a disease outbreak, considering the impacts of both local observations and global information. One important application scenario is that commuters may adjust their behavior upon observing the symptoms and countermeasures from their physical contacts during travel, thus altering the trajectories of a disease outbreak. We introduce the heterogeneous mean-field (HMF) approach in a multiplex network setting to jointly model the spreading dynamics of the infectious disease in the cont…
A common theme among the proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object, i.e., a virus or a piece of information, is transferred across the nodes without going through any modification or evolution. However, in real-life spreading processes, pathogens often evolve in response to changing environments and medical interventions and information is often modified by individuals before being forwarded. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of spreading processes on complex networks with the aim of i) revealing the role of evolution on the threshold, probab…
Effective contact tracing is crucial to contain epidemic spreading without disrupting societal activities especially in the present time of coexistence with a pandemic outbreak. Large gatherings play a key role, potentially favouring superspreading events. However, the effects of tracing in large groups have not been fully assessed so far. We show that beside forward tracing, which reconstructs to whom disease spreads, and backward tracing, which searches from whom disease spreads, a third "sideward" tracing is always present, when tracing gatherings. This is an indirect tracing that detects i…
Infectious diseases are still a major global burden for modern society causing 13 million deaths annually. One way to reduce the morbidity and mortality rates from infectious diseases is through preventative or targeted vaccinations. Current vaccination strategies, however, rely on the highly specific individual contact information that is difficult and costly to obtain, in order to identify influential spreading individuals. Current approaches also focus only on direct contacts between individuals for spreading, and disregard indirect transmission where a pathogen can spread between one infec…
Human behavioral responses play an important role in the impact of disease outbreaks and yet they are often overlooked in epidemiological models. Understanding to what extent behavioral changes determine the outcome of spreading epidemics is essential to design effective intervention policies. Here we explore, analytically, the interplay between the personal decision to protect oneself from infection and the spreading of an epidemic. We do so by coupling a decision game based on the perceived risk of infection with a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model. Interestingly, we find that the simpl…
Contacts between individuals play an important role in determining how infectious diseases spread. Various methods to gather data on such contacts co-exist, from surveys to wearable sensors. Comparisons of data obtained by different methods in the same context are however scarce, in particular with respect to their use in data-driven models of spreading processes. Here, we use a combined data set describing contacts registered by sensors and friendship relations in the same population to address this issue in a case study. We investigate if the use of the friendship network is equivalent to a …
The design of an efficient curing policy, able to stem an epidemic process at an affordable cost, has to account for the structure of the population contact network supporting the contagious process. Thus, we tackle the problem of allocating recovery resources among the population, at the lowest cost possible to prevent the epidemic from persisting indefinitely in the network. Specifically, we analyze a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic process spreading over a weighted graph, by means of a first-order mean-field approximation. First, we describe the influence of the contact network on…
Infectious diseases are a significant threat to human society which was over sighted before the incidence of COVID-19, although according to the report of the World Health Organisation (WHO) about 4.2 million people die annually due to infectious disease. Due to recent COVID-19 pandemic, more than 2 million people died during 2020 and 96.2 million people got affected by this devastating disease. Recent research shows that applying individual interactions and movements data could help managing the pandemic though modelling the spread of infectious diseases on social contact networks. Infectious…
We are facing a common serious issue, infectious diseases, and trying to suppress the spreading of infection. We need less contact with each other to decrease the chance of infection, but this means loss of economic activity, as well. This tradeoff is inevitable in our society, because we still need direct communication and commuting, so far. The focus of our paper is the structure of society, on which we have direct contacts. We study on spreading process with artificial sosiety model, where each agent has daily cycle and go office and back home, every day. At the same time, infection spreads…
Most studies of disease spreading consider the underlying social network as obtained without the contagion, though epidemic influences people's willingness to contact others: A "friendly" contact may be turned to "unfriendly" to avoid infection. We study the susceptible-infected disease-spreading model on signed networks, in which each edge is associated with a positive or negative sign representing the friendly or unfriendly relation between its end nodes. In a signed network, according to Heider's theory, edge signs evolve such that finally a state of structural balance is achieved, correspo…
Many progresses in the understanding of epidemic spreading models have been obtained thanks to numerous modeling efforts and analytical and numerical studies, considering host populations with very different structures and properties, including complex and temporal interaction networks. Moreover, a number of recent studies have started to go beyond the assumption of an absence of coupling between the spread of a disease and the structure of the contacts on which it unfolds. Models including awareness of the spread have been proposed, to mimic possible precautionary measures taken by individual…
Many processes of spreading and diffusion take place on temporal networks, and their outcomes are influenced by correlations in the times of contact. These correlations have a particularly strong influence on processes where the spreading agent has a limited lifetime at nodes: disease spreading (recovery time), diffusion of rumors (lifetime of information), and passenger routing (maximum acceptable time between transfers). Here, we introduce weighted event graphs as a powerful and fast framework for studying connectivity determined by time-respecting paths where the allowed waiting times betwe…
