Epidemic Spreading Combined with Age and Region in Complex Networks

Abstract

In social networks, the age and the region of individuals are the two most important factors in modeling infectious diseases. In this paper, a spatial susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model is proposed to describe epidemic spreading over a network with region and age by establishing several partial differential equations. Numerical simulations are performed, and the simulation of the proposed model agrees well with real influenza-like illness (ILI) in the USA reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Moreover, the proposed model can be used to predict the infected density of individuals. The results show that our model can be used as a tool to analyze influenza cases in the real world.