Predicting the sources of an outbreak with a spectral technique

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spectral method to identify multiple outbreak sources within contact networks, effective especially when the network resembles a tree, aiding epidemic source detection.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel spectral technique for locating outbreak sources using only contact graph data, applicable to various epidemic scenarios.

Findings

Effective in identifying sources in tree-like contact networks

Works on diverse outbreak graphs including flu and H5N1

Requires only the undirected contact graph

Abstract

The epidemic spreading of a disease can be described by a contact network whose nodes are persons or centers of contagion and links heterogeneous relations among them. We provide a procedure to identify multiple sources of an outbreak or their closer neighbors. Our methodology is based on a simple spectral technique requiring only the knowledge of the undirected contact graph. The algorithm is tested on a variety of graphs collected from outbreaks including fluency, H5N1, Tbc, in urban and rural areas. Results show that the spectral technique is able to identify the source nodes if the graph approximates a tree sufficiently.