The impact of human activity patterns on asymptomatic infectious processes in complex networks

Abstract

The study of the impact of human activity patterns on network dynamics has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, individuals' knowledge of their own physical states has rarely been incorporated into modeling processes. In real life, for certain infectious processes, infected agents may not have any visible or physical signs and symptoms; therefore, they may believe that they are uninfected even when they have been infected asymptomatically. This infection awareness factor is covered neither in the classical epidemic models such as SIS nor in network propagation studies. In this article, we propose a novel infectious process model that differentiates between the infection awareness states and the physical states of individuals and extend the SIS model to deal with both asymptomatic infection characteristics and human activity patterns. With regards to the latter, we focus particularly on individuals' testing action, which is to determine whether an individual is infected by an epidemic. The simulation results show that less effort is required in controlling the disease when the transmission probability is either very small or large enough and that Poisson activity patterns are more effective than heavy-tailed patterns in controlling and eliminating asymptomatic infectious diseases due to the long-tail characteristic. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.