The impact that information diffusion has on epidemic spreading has recently attracted much attention. As a disease begins to spread in the population, information about the disease is transmitted to others, which in turn has an effect on the spread
of disease. In this paper, using empirical results of the propagation of H7N9 and information about the disease, we clearly show that the spreading dynamics of the two-types of processes influence each other. We build a mathematical model in which both types of spreading dynamics are described using the SIS process in order to illustrate the influence of information diffusion on epidemic spreading. Both the simulation results and the pairwise analysis reveal that information diffusion can increase the threshold of an epidemic outbreak, decrease the final fraction of infected individuals and significantly decrease the rate at which the epidemic propagates. Additionally, we find that the multi-outbreak phenomena of epidemic spreading, along with the impact of information diffusion, is consistent with the empirical results. These findings highlight the requirement to maintain social awareness of diseases even when the epidemics seem to be under control in order to prevent a subsequent outbreak. These results may shed light on the in-depth understanding of the interplay between the dynamics of epidemic spreading and information diffusion.
can evolve simultaneously. For the information-driven adaptive process, susceptible (infected) individuals who have abilities to recognize the disease would break the links of their infected (susceptible) neighbors to prevent the epidemic from furthe
r spreading. Simulation results and numerical analyses based on the pairwise approach indicate that the information-driven adaptive process can not only slow down the speed of epidemic spreading, but can also diminish the epidemic prevalence at the final state significantly. In addition, the disease spreading and information diffusion pattern on the lattice give a visual representation about how the disease is trapped into an isolated field with the information-driven adaptive process. Furthermore, we perform the local bifurcation analysis on four types of dynamical regions, including healthy, oscillatory, bistable and endemic, to understand the evolution of the observed dynamical behaviors. This work may shed some lights on understanding how information affects human activities on responding to epidemic spreading.
Recently, information transmission models motivated by the classical epidemic propagation, have been applied to a wide-range of social systems, generally assume that information mainly transmits among individuals via peer-to-peer interactions on soci
al networks. In this paper, we consider one more approach for users to get information: the out-of-social-network influence. Empirical analyses of eight typical events diffusion on a very large micro-blogging system, emph{Sina Weibo}, show that the external influence has significant impact on information spreading along with social activities. In addition, we propose a theoretical model to interpret the spreading process via both internal and external channels, considering three essential properties: (i) memory effect; (ii) role of spreaders; and (iii) non-redundancy of contacts. Experimental and mathematical results indicate that the information indeed spreads much quicker and broader with mutual effects of the internal and external influences. More importantly, the present model reveals that the event characteristic would highly determine the essential spreading patterns once the network structure is established. The results may shed some light on the in-depth understanding of the underlying dynamics of information transmission on real social networks.
