Related papers: Social network analysis of Staphylococcus aureus c…
Yet in spite of advances in hospital treatment, hospitals continue to be a breeding ground for several airborne diseases and for diseases that are transmitted through close contacts like SARS, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus…
Understanding the impact of different social interactions is key to improving epidemic models. Here, we use extensive registry data -- including PCR test results and population-level networks -- to investigate the impact of school, family,…
The present work discusses the pertinence of a 'sociotype' construct, both theoretically and empirically oriented. The term, based on the conceptual chain genotype-phenotype-sociotype, suggests an evolutionary preference in the human…
It is commonly believed that information spreads between individuals like a pathogen, with each exposure by an informed friend potentially resulting in a naive individual becoming infected. However, empirical studies of social media suggest…
We consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an…
In this work, the spread of a contagious disease on a society where the individuals may take precautions is modeled. The primary assumption is that the infected individuals transmit the infection to the susceptible members of the community…
We present and analyze an actively controlled Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (actSIS) model of interconnected populations to study how risk aversion strategies, such as social distancing, affect network epidemics. A population using a…
We consider SIS contagion processes over networks where, a classical assumption is that individuals' decisions to adopt a contagion are based on their immediate neighbors. However, recent literature shows that some attributes are more…
Current methods for the detection of contagious outbreaks give contemporaneous information about the course of an epidemic at best. Individuals at the center of a social network are likely to be infected sooner, on average, than those at…
Current tests for contagion in social network studies are vulnerable to the confounding effects of latent homophily (i.e., ties form preferentially between individuals with similar hidden traits). We demonstrate a general method to lower…
A prominent threat to causal inference about peer effects over social networks is the presence of homophily bias, that is, social influence between friends and families is entangled with common characteristics or underlying similarities…
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a difficult-to-treat infection that only in the European Union affects about 150,000 patients and causes extra costs of 380 million Euros annually to the health-care systems. Increasing…
While research on adolescent smoking is extensive, little attention has been given to smoking behaviors among rural middle-aged and older adults. This study examines the role of personal networks and sociodemographic factors in predicting…
This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffusion in online social media. Over several decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that similarity breeds connection:…
Households play a crucial role in the propagation of infectious diseases due to the frequent and prolonged interactions that typically occur between their members. Recent studies have emphasized the need to include socioeconomic variables…
The epidemic spreading has been widely studied when each node may get infected by an infected neighbor with the same rate. However, the infection rate between a pair of nodes is usually heterogeneous and even correlated with their nodal…
We examine how the behaviour of high degree vertices in a network affects whether an infection spreads through communities or jumps between them. We study two stochastic susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) processes and represent our…
Social networks influence health-related behaviors, such as obesity and smoking. While researchers have studied social networks as a driver for diffusion of influences and behaviors, it is less understood how the structure or topology of…
An outstanding problem of interdisciplinary interest is to understand quantitatively the role of social contacts in contagion dynamics. In general, there are two types of contacts: close ones among friends, colleagues and family members,…
Social contact patterns are a key input to many infectious disease models. Contact surveys, where participants are asked to provide information on their recent close and casual contacts with others, are one of the standard methods to…