Researchers hope to improve future epidemic predictions

Science Daily  April 6, 2020
A common theme among previously proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object (e.g., a pathogen or a piece of information) is transferred across network nodes without going through any modification or evolutionary adaptations. In real-life spreading processes, pathogens often evolve in response to changing environments and medical interventions, and information is often modified by individuals before being forwarded. A team of researchers in the US (Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University) investigate the effects of evolutionary adaptations on spreading processes in complex networks with the aim of revealing the role of evolutionary adaptations on the threshold, probability, and final size of epidemics and exploring the interplay between the structural properties of the network and the evolutionary adaptations of the spreading process…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE