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The Scaling of Human Contacts in Reaction-Diffusion Processes on Heterogeneous Metapopulation Networks

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 Added by Nicola Perra
 Publication date 2014
  fields Physics Biology
and research's language is English




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We present new empirical evidence, based on millions of interactions on Twitter, confirming that human contacts scale with population sizes. We integrate such observations into a reaction-diffusion metapopulation framework providing an analytical expression for the global invasion threshold of a contagion process. Remarkably, the scaling of human contacts is found to facilitate the spreading dynamics. Our results show that the scaling properties of human interactions can significantly affect dynamical processes mediated by human contacts such as the spread of diseases, and ideas.



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Dynamical reaction-diffusion processes and meta-population models are standard modeling approaches for a wide variety of phenomena in which local quantities - such as density, potential and particles - diffuse and interact according to the physical laws. Here, we study the behavior of two basic reaction-diffusion processes ($B to A$ and $A+B to 2B$) defined on networks with heterogeneous topology and no limit on the nodes occupation number. We investigate the effect of network topology on the basic properties of the systems phase diagram and find that the network heterogeneity sustains the reaction activity even in the limit of a vanishing density of particles, eventually suppressing the critical point in density driven phase transitions, whereas phase transition and critical points, independent of the particle density, are not altered by topological fluctuations. This work lays out a theoretical and computational microscopic framework for the study of a wide range of realistic meta-populations models and agent-based models that include the complex features of real world networks.
We study a simple reaction-diffusion population model [proposed by A. Windus and H. J. Jensen, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 40, 2287 (2007)] on scale-free networks. In the case of fully random diffusion, the network topology cannot affect the critical death rate, whereas the heterogeneous connectivity can cause smaller steady population density and critical population density. In the case of modified diffusion, we obtain a larger critical death rate and steady population density, at the meanwhile, lower critical population density, which is good for the survival of species. The results were obtained using a mean-field-like framework and were confirmed by computer simulations.
We develop a generalized group-based epidemic model (GgroupEM) framework for any compartmental epidemic model (for example; susceptible-infected-susceptible, susceptible-infected-recovered, susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered). Here, a group consists of a collection of individual nodes. This model can be used to understand the important dynamic characteristics of a stochastic epidemic spreading over very large complex networks, being informative about the state of groups. Aggregating nodes by groups, the state space becomes smaller than the individual-based approach at the cost of aggregation error, which is strongly bounded by the isoperimetric inequality. We also develop a mean-field approximation of this framework to further reduce the state-space size. Finally, we extend the GgroupEM to multilayer networks. Since the group-based framework is computationally less expensive and faster than an individual-based framework, then this framework is useful when the simulation time is important.
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the dynamics of the outbreak, including pathogens epidemiological traits (e.g. transmissibility, infectious period and duration of immunity), seasonality, interaction with other circulating strains and hosts mixing and spatial fragmentation. Here, we study a susceptible-infected-recovered-susceptible model on a metapopulation where individuals are distributed in subpopulations connected via a network of mobility flows. Through extensive numerical simulations, we explore the phase space of pathogens persistence and map the dynamical regimes of the pathogen following emergence. Our results show that spatial fragmentation and mobility play a key role in the persistence of the disease whose maximum is reached at intermediate mobility values. We describe the occurrence of different phenomena including local extinction and emergence of epidemic waves, and assess the conditions for large scale spreading. Findings are highlighted in reference to previous works and to real scenarios. Our work uncovers the crucial role of hosts mobility on the ecological dynamics of rapidly mutating pathogens, opening the path for further studies on disease ecology in the presence of a complex and heterogeneous environment.
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