Predicting Contagion Speed

American Physical Society  February 12, 2020 To effectively monitor, design, or intervene in epidemic-like processes, there is a need to predict the speed of a particular contagion in a particular network, and to distinguish between nodes that are more likely to become infected sooner or later during an outbreak. Researchers in the UK studied global transport and communication networks using a message-passing approach to derive simple and effective predictions that are validated against epidemic simulations on a variety of real-world networks with good agreement. In addition to individualized predictions for different nodes, they found an overall sudden transition from low […]