Suppressing Epidemics with a Limited Amount of Immunization Units

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimized immunization strategy that effectively reduces epidemic spread in various networks using limited immunization resources, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel immunization approach based on susceptible size optimization, significantly improving network resilience against epidemics with fewer immunization units.

Findings

Network vulnerability is greatly reduced by the new strategy.

Infection probability decreases by up to 55% with limited immunizations.

Effective across different real-world networks.

Abstract

The way diseases spread through schools, epidemics through countries, and viruses through the Internet is crucial in determining their risk. Although each of these threats has its own characteristics, its underlying network determines the spreading. To restrain the spreading, a widely used approach is the fragmentation of these networks through immunization, so that epidemics cannot spread. Here we develop an immunization approach based on optimizing the susceptible size, which outperforms the best known strategy based on immunizing the highest-betweenness links or nodes. We find that the network's vulnerability can be significantly reduced, demonstrating this on three different real networks: the global flight network, a school friendship network, and the internet. In all cases, we find that not only is the average infection probability significantly suppressed, but also for the most relevant case of a small and limited number of immunization units the infection probability can be reduced by up to 55%.