Eur. Phys. J. B (2016) 89: 243
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2016-60953-5

Regular Article

On the numerical study of percolation and epidemic critical properties in networks

¹ Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi (ISC-CNR), via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Roma, Italy
² Dipartimento di Fisica, “Sapienza” Università di Roma, P.le A. Moro 2, 00185 Roma, Italy
³ Departament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

^a e-mail: claudio.castellano@roma1.infn.it

Received: 11 December 2015
Received in final form: 20 May 2016
Published online: 9 November 2016

Abstract

The static properties of the fundamental model for epidemics of diseases allowing immunity (susceptible-infected-removed model) are known to be derivable by an exact mapping to bond percolation. Yet when performing numerical simulations of these dynamics in a network a number of subtleties must be taken into account in order to correctly estimate the transition point and the associated critical properties. We expose these subtleties and identify the different quantities which play the role of criticality detector in the two dynamics.