Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 3: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics I (joint session SOE / DY / BP)

SOE 3.4: Talk

Monday, March 7, 2016, 10:45–11:00, H36

Effective Distances in Complex Networks — Flavio Iannelli¹, •Andreas Koher², Philipp Hövel², and Igor M. Sokolov¹ — ¹Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany — ²Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

The analysis of global epidemics revealed that physical distances can hardly be used to forecast the outbreak dynamics. Instead, a network-based measure which has been introduced recently [1] allows to predict infection arrival times with a surprisingly high accuracy. The so-called effective distances are solely based on the (weighted) network topology.

We present an alternative approach, which is motivated by a fundamental property from the theory of random walks: The distribution of first passage times. This random walk based distance allows to forecast disease dynamics on various topologies. For the special case of highly heterogeneous networks it reduces to the previously introduced effective distance.

[1] Brockmann D, Helbing D "The hidden geometry of complex, network-driven contagion phenomena." Science. 2013;342(6164):1337--1342