Dynamics of epidemic models from cavity master equations

TL;DR

This paper applies the cavity master equation approach to epidemic models, demonstrating improved accuracy over traditional mean field methods and extending it to various disease models.

Contribution

The paper introduces the cavity master equation method for epidemic modeling and shows its superior accuracy compared to existing approaches.

Findings

CME outperforms mean field and message passing methods

Effective for SIS, SIR, and SIRS models

Provides more accurate epidemic predictions

Abstract

We apply the cavity master equation (CME) approach to epidemics models. We explore mostly the susceptible-infectious-susceptible (SIS) model, which can be readily treated with the CME as a two-state. We show that this approach is more accurate than individual based and pair based mean field methods, and a previously published dynamic message passing scheme. We explore average case predictions and extend the cavity master equation to SIR and SIRS models.