Burstiness and spreading on temporal networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the timing and order of events in temporal networks influence spreading processes, emphasizing the importance of event ordering over tail distributions, and demonstrating significant effects on dynamics like epidemics and random walks.

Contribution

It highlights the critical role of event ordering in temporal networks and shows that detailed temporal modeling can significantly alter spreading dynamics.

Findings

Event ordering impacts spreading processes.

Bulk of inter-event time distributions influences dynamics.

Detailed temporal modeling changes epidemic persistence.

Abstract

We discuss how spreading processes on temporal networks are impacted by the shape of their inter-event time distributions. Through simple mathematical arguments and toy examples, we find that the key factor is the ordering in which events take place, a property that tends to be affected by the bulk of the distributions and not only by their tail, as usually considered in the literature. We show that a detailed modeling of the temporal patterns observed in complex networks can change dramatically the properties of a spreading process, such as the ergodicity of a random walk process or the persistence of an epidemic.