https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2018-80718-4
Regular Article
The fastest spreader in SIS epidemics on networks
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology,
2628
CD Delft, The Netherlands
a e-mail: Z.He@tudelft.nl
Received:
20
December
2017
Received in final form:
13
February
2018
Published online: 2
May
2018
Identifying the fastest spreaders in epidemics on a network helps to ensure an efficient spreading. By ranking the average spreading time for different spreaders, we show that the fastest spreader may change with the effective infection rate of a SIS epidemic process, which means that the time-dependent influence of a node is usually strongly coupled to the dynamic process and the underlying network. With increasing effective infection rate, we illustrate that the fastest spreader changes from the node with the largest degree to the node with the shortest flooding time. (The flooding time is the minimum time needed to reach all other nodes if the process is reduced to a flooding process.) Furthermore, by taking the local topology around the spreader and the average flooding time into account, we propose the spreading efficiency as a metric to quantify the efficiency of a spreader and identify the fastest spreader, which is adaptive to different infection rates in general networks.
Key words: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
© The Author(s) 2018. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
