Pan Yaohui, Yan Zhijun
School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.
Chaos. 2018 Jun;28(6):063123. doi: 10.1063/1.5000280.
Awareness of disease outbreaks can trigger changes in human behavior and has a significant impact on the spread of epidemics. Previous studies usually considered the coupled awareness-epidemic dynamics to be two competing processes that interact in the information and epidemic layers. However, these studies mostly assumed that all aware individuals have the same reduced infectivity and that different neighbors have the same influence on one's perception, ignoring the heterogeneity of individuals. In this paper, we propose a coupled awareness-epidemic spreading model in multiplex networks incorporating three types of heterogeneity: (1) the heterogeneity of individual responses to disease outbreaks, (2) the influence heterogeneity in the epidemic layer, and (3) the influence heterogeneity in the information layer. The theoretical analysis shows that the influence heterogeneity in the information layer has two-stage effects on the epidemic threshold. Moreover, we find that the epidemic threshold in the higher stage depends on the heterogeneity of individual responses and the influence heterogeneity in the epidemic layer, while the epidemic threshold in the lower stage is independent of awareness spreading and individual behaviors. The results give us a better understanding of how individual heterogeneity affects epidemic spreading and provide some practical implications for the control of epidemics.
对疾病爆发的认知会引发人类行为的改变，并对流行病的传播产生重大影响。以往的研究通常将认知 - 流行病动力学视为在信息层和流行病层相互作用的两个竞争过程。然而，这些研究大多假设所有有认知的个体具有相同程度降低的传染性，并且不同的邻居对一个人的认知有相同的影响，忽略了个体的异质性。在本文中，我们提出了一种在多重网络中的耦合认知 - 流行病传播模型，该模型纳入了三种类型的异质性：（1）个体对疾病爆发反应的异质性，（2）流行病层中的影响异质性，以及（3）信息层中的影响异质性。理论分析表明，信息层中的影响异质性对流行病阈值有两阶段效应。此外，我们发现较高阶段的流行病阈值取决于个体反应的异质性和流行病层中的影响异质性，而较低阶段的流行病阈值与认知传播和个体行为无关。这些结果使我们能更好地理解个体异质性如何影响流行病传播，并为流行病控制提供一些实际启示。
