Epidemic spreading on complex networks with overlapping and non-overlapping community structure

Jiaxing Shang, Lianchen Liu, Xin Li, Feng Xie and Cheng Wu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2015, vol. 419, issue C, 171-182

Abstract: Many real-world networks exhibit community structure where vertices belong to one or more communities. Recent studies show that community structure plays an import role in epidemic spreading. In this paper, we investigate how the extent of overlap among communities affects epidemics. In order to experiment on the characteristic of overlapping communities, we propose a rewiring algorithm that can change the community structure from overlapping to non-overlapping while maintaining the degree distribution of the network. We simulate the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) epidemic process on synthetic scale-free networks and real-world networks by applying our rewiring algorithm. Experiments show that epidemics spread faster on networks with higher level of overlapping communities. Furthermore, overlapping communities’ effect interacts with the average degree’s effect. Our work further illustrates the important role of overlapping communities in the process of epidemic spreading.

Keywords: Complex networks; Epidemic spreading; Community structure; Overlapping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:419:y:2015:i:c:p:171-182

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2014.10.023

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