No Arabic abstract
Identifying the most influential spreaders is important to understand and control the spreading process in a network. As many real-world complex systems can be modeled as multilayer networks, the question of identifying important nodes in multilayer network has attracted much attention. Existing studies focus on the multilayer network structure, while neglecting how the structural and dynamical coupling of multiple layers influence the dynamical importance of nodes in the network. Here we investigate on this question in an information-disease coupled spreading dynamics on multiplex networks. Firstly, we explicitly reveal that three interlayer coupling factors, which are the two-layer relative spreading speed, the interlayer coupling strength and the two-layer degree correlation, significantly impact the spreading influence of a node on the contact layer. The suppression effect from the information layer makes the structural centrality on the contact layer fail to predict the spreading influence of nodes in the multiplex network. Then by mapping the coevolving spreading dynamics into percolation process and using the message-passing approach, we propose a method to calculate the size of the disease outbreaks from a single seed node, which can be used to estimate the nodes spreading influence in the coevolving dynamics. Our work provides insights on the importance of nodes in the multiplex network and gives a feasible framework to investigate influential spreaders in the asymmetrically coevolving dynamics.
Measuring and optimizing the influence of nodes in big-data online social networks are important for many practical applications, such as the viral marketing and the adoption of new products. As the viral spreading on social network is a global process, it is commonly believed that measuring the influence of nodes inevitably requires the knowledge of the entire network. Employing percolation theory, we show that the spreading process displays a nucleation behavior: once a piece of information spread from the seeds to more than a small characteristic number of nodes, it reaches a point of no return and will quickly reach the percolation cluster, regardless of the entire network structure, otherwise the spreading will be contained locally. Thus, we find that, without the knowledge of entire network, any nodes global influence can be accurately measured using this characteristic number, which is independent of the network size. This motivates an efficient algorithm with constant time complexity on the long standing problem of best seed spreaders selection, with performance remarkably close to the true optimum.
In the early stage of epidemics, individuals determination on adopting protective measures, which can reduce their risk of infection and suppress disease spreading, is likely to depend on multiple information sources and their mutual confirmation due to inadequate exact information. Here we introduce the inter-layer mutual confirmation mechanism into the information-disease interacting dynamics on multiplex networks. In our model, an individual increases the information transmission rate and willingness to adopt protective measures once he confirms the authenticity of news and severity of disease from neighbors status in multiple layers. By using the microscopic Markov chain approach, we analytically calculate the epidemic threshold and the awareness and infected density in the stationary state, which agree well with simulation results. We find that the increment of epidemic threshold when confirming the aware neighbors on communication layer is larger than that of the contact layer. On the contrary, the confirmation of neighbors awareness and infection from the contact layer leads to a lower final infection density and a higher awareness density than that of the communication layer. The results imply that individuals explicit exposure of their infection and awareness status to neighbors, especially those with real contacts, is helpful in suppressing epidemic spreading.
Identifying influential spreaders is crucial for understanding and controlling spreading processes on social networks. Via assigning degree-dependent weights onto links associated with the ground node, we proposed a variant to a recent ranking algorithm named LeaderRank [L. Lv et al., PLoS ONE 6 (2011) e21202]. According to the simulations on the standard SIR model, the weighted LeaderRank performs better than LeaderRank in three aspects: (i) the ability to find out more influential spreaders, (ii) the higher tolerance to noisy data, and (iii) the higher robustness to intentional attacks.
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 COVID-19 can be identified with remarkable accuracy. Specifically, based on the unique characteristics of COVID-19 spreading dynamics, we propose a computational framework capturing the transition probabilities among different infectious states in a network, and extend it to an efficient algorithm to identify asymptotic individuals. Our simulation results indicate that a screening method using our prediction outperforms machine learning algorithms, e.g. graph neural networks, that are designed as baselines in this work, as well as random screening of infections closest contacts widely used by China in its early outbreak. Furthermore, our method provides high precision even with incomplete information of the contract-tracing networks. Our work can be of critical importance to the non-pharmacological interventions of COVID-19, especially with increasing adoptions of contact tracing measures using various new technologies. Beyond COVID-19, our framework can be useful for other epidemic diseases that also feature asymptomatic spreading
Identifying super-spreaders in epidemics is important to suppress the spreading of disease especially when the medical resource is limited.In the modern society, the information on epidemics transmits swiftly through various communication channels which contributes much to the suppression of epidemics. Here we study on the identification of super-spreaders in the information-disease coupled spreading dynamics. Firstly, we find that the centralities in physical contact layer are no longer effective to identify super-spreaders in epidemics, which is due to the suppression effects from the information spreading. Then by considering the structural and dynamical couplings between the communication layer and physical contact layer, we propose a centrality measure called coupling-sensitive centrality to identify super-spreaders in disease spreading. Simulation results on synthesized and real-world multiplex networks show that the proposed measure is not only much more accurate than centralities on the single network, but also outperforms two typical multilayer centralities in identifying super-spreaders. These findings imply that considering the structural and dynamical couplings between layers is very necessary in identifying the key roles in the coupled multilayer systems.