The Scaling of Human Contacts in Reaction-Diffusion Processes on Heterogeneous Metapopulation Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how human contact patterns, which scale with population size, influence the spread of contagions and ideas in heterogeneous networks, providing empirical evidence and an analytical framework.

Contribution

It introduces a reaction-diffusion metapopulation model incorporating empirical contact scaling, offering new insights into contagion dynamics on complex networks.

Findings

Human contacts scale with population size based on Twitter data.

Scaling of contacts facilitates faster spreading of contagions.

The model provides an analytical expression for the invasion threshold.

Abstract

We present new empirical evidence, based on millions of interactions on Twitter, confirming that human contacts scale with population sizes. We integrate such observations into a reaction-diffusion metapopulation framework providing an analytical expression for the global invasion threshold of a contagion process. Remarkably, the scaling of human contacts is found to facilitate the spreading dynamics. Our results show that the scaling properties of human interactions can significantly affect dynamical processes mediated by human contacts such as the spread of diseases, and ideas.