Small inter-event times govern epidemic spreading on temporal networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that small inter-event times, rather than high degrees, primarily control epidemic spreading on temporal networks, with implications for understanding and modeling disease dynamics.

Contribution

It reveals that short inter-event times are more influential than high node degrees in epidemic spread, supported by analytical and numerical analysis.

Findings

Small inter-event times dominate epidemic dynamics.

High degrees are less critical than inter-event times.

Results apply across various network types and SIR models.

Abstract

Just like the degrees of human and animal interaction networks, the distribution of the times between interactions is known to often be right-skewed and fat-tailed. Both these distributions affect epidemic dynamics strongly, but, as we show in this Letter, for very different reasons. Whereas the high degrees of the tail are critical for facilitating epidemics, it is the small interevent times that control the dynamics of epidemics. We investigate this effect both analytically and numerically for different versions of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model on different types of networks.