66,505 research outputs found
Causal Inference in Disease Spread across a Heterogeneous Social System
Diffusion processes are governed by external triggers and internal dynamics
in complex systems. Timely and cost-effective control of infectious disease
spread critically relies on uncovering the underlying diffusion mechanisms,
which is challenging due to invisible causality between events and their
time-evolving intensity. We infer causal relationships between infections and
quantify the reflexivity of a meta-population, the level of feedback on event
occurrences by its internal dynamics (likelihood of a regional outbreak
triggered by previous cases). These are enabled by our new proposed model, the
Latent Influence Point Process (LIPP) which models disease spread by
incorporating macro-level internal dynamics of meta-populations based on human
mobility. We analyse 15-year dengue cases in Queensland, Australia. From our
causal inference, outbreaks are more likely driven by statewide global
diffusion over time, leading to complex behavior of disease spread. In terms of
reflexivity, precursory growth and symmetric decline in populous regions is
attributed to slow but persistent feedback on preceding outbreaks via
inter-group dynamics, while abrupt growth but sharp decline in peripheral areas
is led by rapid but inconstant feedback via intra-group dynamics. Our proposed
model reveals probabilistic causal relationships between discrete events based
on intra- and inter-group dynamics and also covers direct and indirect
diffusion processes (contact-based and vector-borne disease transmissions).Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.0635
Optimal curing policy for epidemic spreading over a community network with heterogeneous population
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 the
dynamics of the epidemics among a heterogeneous population, that is possibly
divided into communities. For the case of a community network, our
investigation relies on the graph-theoretical notion of equitable partition; we
show that the epidemic threshold, a key measure of the network robustness
against epidemic spreading, can be determined using a lower-dimensional
dynamical system. Exploiting the computation of the epidemic threshold, we
determine a cost-optimal curing policy by solving a convex minimization
problem, which possesses a reduced dimension in the case of a community
network. Lastly, we consider a two-level optimal curing problem, for which an
algorithm is designed with a polynomial time complexity in the network size.Comment: to be published on Journal of Complex Network
Suppressing disease spreading by using information diffusion on multiplex networks
Although there is always an interplay between the dynamics of information
diffusion and disease spreading, the empirical research on the systemic
coevolution mechanisms connecting these two spreading dynamics is still
lacking. Here we investigate the coevolution mechanisms and dynamics between
information and disease spreading by utilizing real data and a proposed
spreading model on multiplex network. Our empirical analysis finds asymmetrical
interactions between the information and disease spreading dynamics. Our
results obtained from both the theoretical framework and extensive stochastic
numerical simulations suggest that an information outbreak can be triggered in
a communication network by its own spreading dynamics or by a disease outbreak
on a contact network, but that the disease threshold is not affected by
information spreading. Our key finding is that there is an optimal information
transmission rate that markedly suppresses the disease spreading. We find that
the time evolution of the dynamics in the proposed model qualitatively agrees
with the real-world spreading processes at the optimal information transmission
rate.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
Collaborative Inference of Coexisting Information Diffusions
Recently, \textit{diffusion history inference} has become an emerging
research topic due to its great benefits for various applications, whose
purpose is to reconstruct the missing histories of information diffusion traces
according to incomplete observations. The existing methods, however, often
focus only on single information diffusion trace, while in a real-world social
network, there often coexist multiple information diffusions over the same
network. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Collaborative
Inference Model (CIM) for the problem of the inference of coexisting
information diffusions. By exploiting the synergism between the coexisting
information diffusions, CIM holistically models multiple information diffusions
as a sparse 4th-order tensor called Coexisting Diffusions Tensor (CDT) without
any prior assumption of diffusion models, and collaboratively infers the
histories of the coexisting information diffusions via a low-rank approximation
of CDT with a fusion of heterogeneous constraints generated from additional
data sources. To improve the efficiency, we further propose an optimal
algorithm called Time Window based Parallel Decomposition Algorithm (TWPDA),
which can speed up the inference without compromise on the accuracy by
utilizing the temporal locality of information diffusions. The extensive
experiments conducted on real world datasets and synthetic datasets verify the
effectiveness and efficiency of CIM and TWPDA
Optimal Resource Allocation Over Time and Degree Classes for Maximizing Information Dissemination in Social Networks
We study the optimal control problem of allocating campaigning resources over
the campaign duration and degree classes in a social network. Information
diffusion is modeled as a Susceptible-Infected epidemic and direct recruitment
of susceptible nodes to the infected (informed) class is used as a strategy to
accelerate the spread of information. We formulate an optimal control problem
for optimizing a net reward function, a linear combination of the reward due to
information spread and cost due to application of controls. The time varying
resource allocation and seeds for the epidemic are jointly optimized. A problem
variation includes a fixed budget constraint. We prove the existence of a
solution for the optimal control problem, provide conditions for uniqueness of
the solution, and prove some structural results for the controls (e.g. controls
are non-increasing functions of time). The solution technique uses Pontryagin's
Maximum Principle and the forward-backward sweep algorithm (and its
modifications) for numerical computations. Our formulations lead to large
optimality systems with up to about 200 differential equations and allow us to
study the effect of network topology (Erdos-Renyi/scale-free) on the controls.
Results reveal that the allocation of campaigning resources to various degree
classes depends not only on the network topology but also on system parameters
such as cost/abundance of resources. The optimal strategies lead to significant
gains over heuristic strategies for various model parameters. Our modeling
approach assumes uncorrelated network, however, we find the approach useful for
real networks as well. This work is useful in product advertising, political
and crowdfunding campaigns in social networks.Comment: 14 + 4 pages, 11 figures. Author's version of the article accepted
for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. This version includes
4 pages of supplementary material containing proofs of theorems present in
the article. Published version can be accessed at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2015.251254
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