The Scaling of Human Contacts in Reaction-Diffusion Processes on Heterogeneous Metapopulation Networks

2014/11/26 by Michele Tizzoni, Kaiyuan Sun, Tizzoni, Michele +7
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #physics.soc-ph #q-bio.PE

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1411.7310

arxiv created 2014/11/26 · arxiv updated 2014/11/27

Abstract

We present new empirical evidence, based on millions of interactions on Twitter, confirming that human contacts scale with population sizes. We integrate such observations into a reaction-diffusion metapopulation framework providing an analytical expression for the global invasion threshold of a contagion process. Remarkably, the scaling of human contacts is found to facilitate the spreading dynamics. Our results show that the scaling properties of human interactions can significantly affect dynamical processes mediated by human contacts such as the spread of diseases, and ideas.

Related

• Evolving nature of human contact networks with its impact on epidemic processes
• Phase transitions in contagion processes mediated by recurrent mobility patterns
• Physical Proximity and Spreading in Dynamic Social Networks
• Network localization governs social contagion dynamics with macro-level reinforcement
• Spread of infectious diseases through clustered populations