121,653 research outputs found
Predicting epidemic risk from past temporal contact data
Understanding how epidemics spread in a system is a crucial step to prevent
and control outbreaks, with broad implications on the system's functioning,
health, and associated costs. This can be achieved by identifying the elements
at higher risk of infection and implementing targeted surveillance and control
measures. One important ingredient to consider is the pattern of
disease-transmission contacts among the elements, however lack of data or
delays in providing updated records may hinder its use, especially for
time-varying patterns. Here we explore to what extent it is possible to use
past temporal data of a system's pattern of contacts to predict the risk of
infection of its elements during an emerging outbreak, in absence of updated
data. We focus on two real-world temporal systems; a livestock displacements
trade network among animal holdings, and a network of sexual encounters in
high-end prostitution. We define the node's loyalty as a local measure of its
tendency to maintain contacts with the same elements over time, and uncover
important non-trivial correlations with the node's epidemic risk. We show that
a risk assessment analysis incorporating this knowledge and based on past
structural and temporal pattern properties provides accurate predictions for
both systems. Its generalizability is tested by introducing a theoretical model
for generating synthetic temporal networks. High accuracy of our predictions is
recovered across different settings, while the amount of possible predictions
is system-specific. The proposed method can provide crucial information for the
setup of targeted intervention strategies.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures + SI (18 pages, 15 figures
Temporal effects in trend prediction: identifying the most popular nodes in the future
Prediction is an important problem in different science domains. In this
paper, we focus on trend prediction in complex networks, i.e. to identify the
most popular nodes in the future. Due to the preferential attachment mechanism
in real systems, nodes' recent degree and cumulative degree have been
successfully applied to design trend prediction methods. Here we took into
account more detailed information about the network evolution and proposed a
temporal-based predictor (TBP). The TBP predicts the future trend by the node
strength in the weighted network with the link weight equal to its exponential
aging. Three data sets with time information are used to test the performance
of the new method. We find that TBP have high general accuracy in predicting
the future most popular nodes. More importantly, it can identify many potential
objects with low popularity in the past but high popularity in the future. The
effect of the decay speed in the exponential aging on the results is discussed
in detail
Modeling the scaling properties of human mobility
While the fat tailed jump size and the waiting time distributions
characterizing individual human trajectories strongly suggest the relevance of
the continuous time random walk (CTRW) models of human mobility, no one
seriously believes that human traces are truly random. Given the importance of
human mobility, from epidemic modeling to traffic prediction and urban
planning, we need quantitative models that can account for the statistical
characteristics of individual human trajectories. Here we use empirical data on
human mobility, captured by mobile phone traces, to show that the predictions
of the CTRW models are in systematic conflict with the empirical results. We
introduce two principles that govern human trajectories, allowing us to build a
statistically self-consistent microscopic model for individual human mobility.
The model not only accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws but also
allows us to analytically predict most of the pertinent scaling exponents
Can Cascades be Predicted?
On many social networking web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, resharing
or reposting functionality allows users to share others' content with their own
friends or followers. As content is reshared from user to user, large cascades
of reshares can form. While a growing body of research has focused on analyzing
and characterizing such cascades, a recent, parallel line of work has argued
that the future trajectory of a cascade may be inherently unpredictable. In
this work, we develop a framework for addressing cascade prediction problems.
On a large sample of photo reshare cascades on Facebook, we find strong
performance in predicting whether a cascade will continue to grow in the
future. We find that the relative growth of a cascade becomes more predictable
as we observe more of its reshares, that temporal and structural features are
key predictors of cascade size, and that initially, breadth, rather than depth
in a cascade is a better indicator of larger cascades. This prediction
performance is robust in the sense that multiple distinct classes of features
all achieve similar performance. We also discover that temporal features are
predictive of a cascade's eventual shape. Observing independent cascades of the
same content, we find that while these cascades differ greatly in size, we are
still able to predict which ends up the largest
Infrared Consistency of NSVZ and DRED Supersymmetric Gluodynamics
Pade approximant methods are applied to known terms of the DRED beta-
function for N = 1 supersymmetric SU(3) Yang-Mills theory. Each of the [N|M]
approximants with N + M less than or equal to 4 (M not equal to zero)
constructed from this series exhibits a positive pole which precedes any zeros
of the approximant, consistent with the same infrared-attractor pole behaviour
known to characterise the exact NSVZ beta-function. A similar Pade-approximant
analysis of truncations of the NSVZ series is shown consistently to reproduce
the geometric-series pole of the exact NSVZ beta function.Comment: LaTeX, 15 page
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