Two-stage effects of awareness cascade on epidemic spreading in multiplex networks

Abstract

Human awareness plays an important role in the spread of infectious diseases and the control of propagation patterns. The dynamic process with human awareness is called awareness cascade, during which individuals exhibit herd-like behavior because they are making decisions based on the actions of other individuals [Borge-Holthoefer et al., J. Complex Networks 1, 3 (2013)]. In this paper, to investigate the epidemic spreading with awareness cascade, we propose a local awareness controlled contagion spreading model on multiplex networks. By theoretical analysis using a microscopic Markov chain approach and numerical simulations, we find the emergence of an abrupt transition of epidemic threshold β(c) with the local awareness ratio α approximating 0.5, which induces two-stage effects on epidemic threshold and the final epidemic size. These findings indicate that the increase of α can accelerate the outbreak of epidemics. Furthermore, a simple 1D lattice model is investigated to illustrate the two-stage-like sharp transition at α(c)≈0.5. The results can give us a better understanding of why some epidemics cannot break out in reality and also provide a potential access to suppressing and controlling the awareness cascading systems.

Coupled disease–behavior dynamics on complex networks: A review

“…[110] disappear. Furthermore, the social dynamics are further extended to an awareness cascade model [112], during which agents exhibit herd-like behavior because they make decisions referring to the actions of other individuals. Interestingly, it is found that a local awareness ratio (of unaware individuals becoming aware ones) approximating 0.5 has a two-stage effect on the epidemic threshold (i.e., an abrupt transition of epidemic threshold) and can cause different epidemic sizes, irrespective of the network structure.…”

Contagion processes on the static and activity-driven coupling networks

“…Networks modeling plays a key role in identifying structural properties and analyzing the epidemic spreading on networks [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Meantime, it has been acknowledged for decades that connectivity patterns is an important factor in determining the properties of dynamic process [8][9][10][11][12].…”

An Epidemic Spreading Model on the Adaptive Dual networks

“…For example, the crisis awareness introduced into the adaptive behavior could cause a large range of shocks in the infected rate and the network topology [6]. The related studies also found that the adaptive behavioral response will make the effect of the target immune more obvious [7], and the community structure causing in the evolution of the adaptive process makes the disease controlling time more important [8,9]. The above researches focus on the dynamic characteristics in the steady state, however, the exploration of the transient characteristics is very limited.…”

“…In particular, the spread of diseases results in elevated crisis awareness and thus facilitates the diffusion of the awareness about the disease [6], but the diffusion of the awareness promotes more people to take preventive measures and consequently suppresses the epidemic spreading [4]. To understanding how awareness diffusion can mitigate epidemic outbreaks, and more broadly, the asymmetric interacting spreading dynamics led to a new direction of research in complex network science [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. A pioneering step in this direction was taken by Clara [7] who studied the epidemic spreading in the multiplex networks by establishing two layers network, in which one represents epidemic spreading and another represents the diffusion of the information awareness.…”