English

Stochastic epidemic dynamics on extremely heterogeneous networks

Physics and Society 2016-12-21 v2 Biological Physics Populations and Evolution

Abstract

Networks of contacts capable of spreading infectious diseases are often observed to be highly heterogeneous, with the majority of individuals having fewer contacts than the mean, and a significant minority having relatively very many contacts. We derive a two-dimensional diffusion model for the full temporal behavior of the stochastic susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model on such a network, by making use of a time-scale separation in the deterministic limit of the dynamics. This low-dimensional process is an accurate approximation to the full model in the limit of large populations, even for cases when the time-scale separation is not too pronounced, provided the maximum degree is not of the order of the population size.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.08450,
  title  = {Stochastic epidemic dynamics on extremely heterogeneous networks},
  author = {César Parra-Rojas and Thomas House and Alan J. McKane},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08450},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

22 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:02:51.129Z