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Community structure in social networks: applications for epidemiological modelling.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Kitchovitch, Stephan 
Liò, Pietro 

Abstract

During an infectious disease outbreak people will often change their behaviour to reduce their risk of infection. Furthermore, in a given population, the level of perceived risk of infection will vary greatly amongst individuals. The difference in perception could be due to a variety of factors including varying levels of information regarding the pathogen, quality of local healthcare, availability of preventative measures, etc. In this work we argue that we can split a social network, representing a population, into interacting communities with varying levels of awareness of the disease. We construct a theoretical population and study which such communities suffer most of the burden of the disease and how their awareness affects the spread of infection. We aim to gain a better understanding of the effects that community-structured networks and variations in awareness, or risk perception, have on the disease dynamics and to promote more community-resolved modelling in epidemiology.

Description

Keywords

Communicable Diseases, Computer Simulation, Disease Outbreaks, Disease Susceptibility, Epidemiologic Studies, Humans, Models, Biological, Prevalence, Residence Characteristics, Social Support, Time Factors

Journal Title

PLoS One

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1932-6203
1932-6203

Volume Title

6

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Sponsorship
European Commission (257756)