6,039 research outputs found
Identifying spatial invasion of pandemics on metapopulation networks via anatomizing arrival history
Spatial spread of infectious diseases among populations via the mobility of
humans is highly stochastic and heterogeneous. Accurate forecast/mining of the
spread process is often hard to be achieved by using statistical or mechanical
models. Here we propose a new reverse problem, which aims to identify the
stochastically spatial spread process itself from observable information
regarding the arrival history of infectious cases in each subpopulation. We
solved the problem by developing an efficient optimization algorithm based on
dynamical programming, which comprises three procedures: i, anatomizing the
whole spread process among all subpopulations into disjoint componential
patches; ii, inferring the most probable invasion pathways underlying each
patch via maximum likelihood estimation; iii, recovering the whole process by
assembling the invasion pathways in each patch iteratively, without burdens in
parameter calibrations and computer simulations. Based on the entropy theory,
we introduced an identifiability measure to assess the difficulty level that an
invasion pathway can be identified. Results on both artificial and empirical
metapopulation networks show the robust performance in identifying actual
invasion pathways driving pandemic spread.Comment: 14pages, 8 figures; Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Cybernetic
The progenitors of Type Ia supernovae with long delay times
The nature of the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is still
unclear. In this paper, by considering the effect of the instability of
accretion disk on the evolution of white dwarf (WD) binaries, we performed
binary evolution calculations for about 2400 close WD binaries, in which a
carbon--oxygen WD accretes material from a main-sequence star or a slightly
evolved subgiant star (WD + MS channel), or a red-giant star (WD + RG channel)
to increase its mass to the Chandrasekhar (Ch) mass limit. According to these
calculations, we mapped out the initial parameters for SNe Ia in the orbital
period--secondary mass () plane for various WD
masses for these two channels, respectively. We confirm that WDs in the WD + MS
channel with a mass as low as can accrete efficiently and reach
the Ch limit, while the lowest WD mass for the WD + RG channel is . We have implemented these results in a binary population synthesis
study to obtain the SN Ia birthrates and the evolution of SN Ia birthrates with
time for both a constant star formation rate and a single starburst. We find
that the Galactic SN Ia birthrate from the WD + MS channel is according to our standard model, which is higher than
previous results. However, similar to previous studies, the birthrate from the
WD + RG channel is still low (). We also
find that about one third of SNe Ia from the WD + MS channel and all SNe Ia
from the WD + RG channel can contribute to the old populations (\ga1 Gyr) of
SN Ia progenitors.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRA
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