Pulse strategy for suppressing spreading on networks
This addresses epidemic control for policy makers, offering a more efficient method but is incremental as it builds on existing spreading models.
The paper tackles the problem of suppressing spreading on networks by proposing a pulse curing strategy, showing it saves about 36.8% of curing operations compared to uniform curing, invariant to network structure.
In networked spreading models, each node can infect its neighbors and cure spontaneously. The curing is assumed to occur uniformly over time. A pulse immunization/curing strategy is more efficient and broadly applied to suppressing spreading processes. We model the epidemic process by the basic Susceptible-Infected (SI) process with a pulse curing and incorporate the underlying contact network. The mean-field epidemic threshold of the pulse SI model is shown to be $\frac{1}{λ_1}\ln\frac{1}{1-p}$, where $λ_1$ and $p$ are the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix and the fraction of nodes covered by each curing, respectively. Compared to the extensively studied uniform curing process, we show that the pulse curing strategy saves about $36.8$\%, i.e. $p\approx 0.632$, of the number of curing operations invariant to the network structure. Our results may help related policy makers to estimate the cost of controlling spreading processes.