Effective Network Size Predicted From Simulations of Pathogen Outbreaks Through Social Networks Provides a Novel Measure of Structure-Standardized Group Size.

ABSTRACT: The transmission of infectious disease through a population is often modeled assuming that interactions occur randomly in groups, with all individuals potentially interacting with all other individuals at an equal rate. However, it is well known that pairs of individuals vary in their degree of contact. Here, we propose a measure to account for such heterogeneity: effective network size (ENS), which refers to the size of a maximally complete network (i.e., unstructured, where all individuals interact with all others equally) that corresponds to the outbreak characteristics of a given heterogeneous, structured network. We simulated susceptible-infected (SI) and susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) models on maximally complete networks to produce idealized outbreak duration distributions for

SUBMITTER: McCabe CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5943561 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature