Effects of concurrency on epidemic spreading in Markovian temporal networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how edge concurrency in Markovian temporal networks influences epidemic spreading, revealing that concurrency can both enhance and suppress epidemics depending on the infection rate and proximity to the epidemic threshold.

Contribution

The study introduces analytically tractable Markovian temporal network models with tunable concurrency, providing insights into its effects on epidemic dynamics.

Findings

Concurrency enhances epidemic spreading near the threshold.

At high infection rates, concurrency tends to suppress spreading.

The impact of concurrency is modest but consistent near the epidemic threshold.

Abstract

The concurrency of edges, quantified by the number of edges that share a common node at a given time point, may be an important determinant of epidemic processes in temporal networks. We propose theoretically tractable Markovian temporal network models in which each edge flips between the active and inactive states in continuous time. The different models have different amounts of concurrency while we can tune the models to share the same statistics of edge activation and deactivation (and hence the fraction of time for which each edge is active) and the structure of the aggregate (i.e., static) network. We analytically calculate the amount of concurrency of edges sharing a node for each model. We then numerically study effects of concurrency on epidemic spreading in the stochastic susceptible-infectious-susceptible and susceptible-infectious-recovered dynamics on the proposed temporal network models. We find that the concurrency enhances epidemic spreading near the epidemic threshold while this effect is small in many cases. Furthermore, when the infection rate is substantially larger than the epidemic threshold, the concurrency suppresses epidemic spreading in a majority of cases. In sum, our numerical simulations suggest that the impact of concurrency on enhancing epidemic spreading within our model is consistently present near the epidemic threshold but modest. The proposed temporal network models are expected to be useful for investigating effects of concurrency on various collective dynamics on networks including both infectious and other dynamics.