Graph Theory Approach to Epidemic Study

Abstract

Graphs can be very helpful in understanding a complex situation by presenting it in a simple and meaningful manner. In graphs, there are only two entities we deal with, vertices/nodes and edges/links. The nodes represent the objects and links represent the relationships between them. The application of this theory can be found in diverse fields such as psychology to anthropology and linguistics to communication networks. This chapter contains an introduction to graphs and their applications to the real world. Graph theory is described briefly, followed by the introduction of epidemic studies and a discussion of different types of epidemiology studies. It is discussed how graph theory was used in the study with a few examples on how the theory was used in general. There are also descriptions of different ways of representing the networks in graphs.