Contact Process with Exogenous Infection and the Scaled SIS Process

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the long-term behavior of an extended contact process with exogenous infection on networks, showing that it can be approximated by a scaled SIS process for certain parameters, enabling efficient susceptibility analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the equilibrium distribution of the extended contact process can be approximated by a scaled SIS process on arbitrary networks, facilitating polynomial-time susceptibility analysis.

Findings

Equilibrium distribution of extended contact process approximated by scaled SIS process.

Numerical simulations confirm the approximation accuracy.

Allows efficient identification of susceptible agents and substructures.

Abstract

Propagation of contagion in networks depends on the graph topology. This paper is concerned with studying the time-asymptotic behavior of the extended contact processes on static, undirected, finite-size networks. This is a contact process with nonzero exogenous infection rate (also known as the {\epsilon}-SIS, {\epsilon} susceptible-infected-susceptible, model [1]). The only known analytical characterization of the equilibrium distribution of this process is for complete networks. For large networks with arbitrary topology, it is infeasible to numerically solve for the equilibrium distribution since it requires solving the eigenvalue-eigenvector problem of a matrix that is exponential in N , the size of the network. We show that, for a certain range of the network process parameters, the equilibrium distribution of the extended contact process on arbitrary, finite-size networks is well approximated by the equilibrium distribution of the scaled SIS process, which we derived in closed-form in prior work. We confirm this result with numerical simulations comparing the equilibrium distribution of the extended contact process with that of a scaled SIS process. We use this approximation to decide, in polynomial-time, which agents and network substructures are more susceptible to infection by the extended contact process.