Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 76: Complex Contagion Phenomena II (Focus Session, joint SOE/DY/BP/SNPD) (joint session SOE/DY/BP)

DY 76.3: Talk

Friday, March 16, 2018, 10:15–10:30, MA 001

Identifying the source of large-scale outbreaks of infectious disease — Abigail Horn¹ and •Hanno Friedrich² — ¹Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung, Berlin, Germany — ²Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany

We study the problem of identifying the source of emerging large-scale disease outbreaks: given a model of the underlying network and reports of illness, determine the outbreak source location. Existing work on the network source identification problem has focused on studying this problem in trees and extending to general network structures in an ad hoc manner; this is to assume the contamination travels along a specific set known paths through a network, which may be an unrealistic approximation. In this work we develop a novel, computationally tractable solution that accounts for all possible contagion transmission paths through the network. We formulate a probabilistic model of the contamination transmission process as a random walk on a network and derive the maximum likelihood estimator for the source location. If the temporal dimension of the spreading process is well understood, we also estimate the epidemic start time. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach to source detection through application to various real network and outbreak contexts, including the 2011 STEC outbreak in Germany spread through the food supply network and ongoing outbreaks of cholera in Mozambique spread through human travel, showing significant improvements in accuracy and robustness compared with the relevant state-of-the-art methods.