Suppressing Epidemics with a Limited Amount of Immunization Units

RC working paper No. 12-007

8 Pages Posted: 20 Dec 2012

See all articles by Christian Schneider

Christian Schneider

Computational Physics, IfB, ETH Zurich

Tamara Mihaljev

Computational Physics, IfB, ETH Zurich

Shlomo Havlin

Bar Ilan University

Hans J. Herrmann

ETH Zürich

Date Written: June 7, 2012

Abstract

The way diseases spread through schools, epidemics through countries and viruses through the Internet is crucially determining their risk. Although each of these threats has its own characteristics, its underlying network determines the spreading. To restrain the spreading, a widely used approach is the fragmentation of these networks through immunization, so that epidemics cannot spread. Here we develop a novel immunization approach outperforming the best known strategy, based on immunizing the highest betweenness links or nodes. We find that the network's vulnerability can be significantly reduced demonstrating this on three different real networks: the global flight network, a school friendship network and the Internet. In all cases, we find that not only the average infection probability is significantly suppressed, but also for the most relevant case of a small and limited number of immunization units the infection probability can be reduced by up to 55%.

Keywords: suppressing epidemics

Suggested Citation

Schneider, Christian and Mihaljev, Tamara and Havlin, Shlomo and Herrmann, Hans J., Suppressing Epidemics with a Limited Amount of Immunization Units (June 7, 2012). RC working paper No. 12-007, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2191613 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2191613

Christian Schneider

Computational Physics, IfB, ETH Zurich ( email )

Schafmattstrasse 6
Zurich, 8093
Switzerland

Tamara Mihaljev

Computational Physics, IfB, ETH Zurich ( email )

Schafmattstrasse 6
Zurich, 8093
Switzerland

Shlomo Havlin

Bar Ilan University ( email )

Ramat Gan
Ramat Gan, 52900
Israel

HOME PAGE: http://havlin.biu.ac.il/

Hans J. Herrmann (Contact Author)

ETH Zürich ( email )

Zürichbergstrasse 18
8092 Zurich, CH-1015
Switzerland

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
52
Abstract Views
657
Rank
833,387
PlumX Metrics