Suppressing disease spreading by using information diffusion on multiplex networks

Although there is always an interplay between the dynamics of information diffusion and disease spreading, the empirical research on the systemic coevolution mechanisms connecting these two spreading dynamics is still lacking. Here we investigate the coevolution mechanisms and dynamics between infor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2016-07, Vol.6 (1), p.29259-29259, Article 29259
Main Authors: Wang, Wei, Liu, Quan-Hui, Cai, Shi-Min, Tang, Ming, Braunstein, Lidia A., Stanley, H. Eugene
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/705/1041
639/766/530/2801
Disease Outbreaks
Disease prevention
Disease Transmission, Infectious - prevention & control
Epidemics
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Influenza, Human - epidemiology
Influenza, Human - transmission
Information Dissemination
Investigations
Models, Theoretical
multidisciplinary
Outbreaks
Science
Search engines
Time series
Trends
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Summary:Although there is always an interplay between the dynamics of information diffusion and disease spreading, the empirical research on the systemic coevolution mechanisms connecting these two spreading dynamics is still lacking. Here we investigate the coevolution mechanisms and dynamics between information and disease spreading by utilizing real data and a proposed spreading model on multiplex network. Our empirical analysis finds asymmetrical interactions between the information and disease spreading dynamics. Our results obtained from both the theoretical framework and extensive stochastic numerical simulations suggest that an information outbreak can be triggered in a communication network by its own spreading dynamics or by a disease outbreak on a contact network, but that the disease threshold is not affected by information spreading. Our key finding is that there is an optimal information transmission rate that markedly suppresses the disease spreading. We find that the time evolution of the dynamics in the proposed model qualitatively agrees with the real-world spreading processes at the optimal information transmission rate.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep29259