Epidemic Spreading on Weighted Complex Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how weighted complex networks influence epidemic spreading, analyzing key metrics like outbreak threshold and prevalence through theoretical and simulation methods, revealing that weight distribution impacts are minimal when average weights are fixed.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of epidemic dynamics on weighted networks considering multi-relation edges, combining theoretical and simulation approaches for comprehensive insights.

Findings

Weight distribution does not affect epidemic outcomes when average weight is fixed.

Theoretical and simulation results are in good agreement.

Epidemic spreading behavior is similar across different weight distributions under certain conditions.

Abstract

Nowadays, the emergence of online services provides various multi-relation information to support the comprehensive understanding of the epidemic spreading process. In this Letter, we consider the edge weights to represent such multi-role relations. In addition, we perform detailed analysis of two representative metrics, outbreak threshold and epidemic prevalence, on SIS and SIR models. Both theoretical and simulation results find good agreements with each other. Furthermore, experiments show that, on fully mixed networks, the weight distribution on edges would not affect the epidemic results once the average weight of whole network is fixed. This work may shed some light on the in-depth understanding of epidemic spreading on multi-relation and weighted networks.