Diseases spreading through individual based models with realistic
mobility patterns
A. Medus, und C. Dorso. (2011)cite arxiv:1104.4913
Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PRE.
The individual-based models constitute a set of widely implemented tools to
analyze the incidence of individuals heterogeneities in the spread of an
infectious disease. In this work we focus our attention on human contacts
heterogeneities through two of the main individual-based models: mobile agents
and complex networks models. We introduce a novel mobile agents model in which
individuals make displacements with sizes according to a truncated power-law
distribution based on empirical evidence about human mobility. Besides, we
present a procedure to obtain an equivalent weighted contact network from the
previous mobile agents model, where the weights of the links are interpreted as
contact probabilities. From the topological analysis of the equivalent contact
networks we show that small world characteristics are related with truncated
power-law distribution for agent displacements. Finally, we show the
equivalence between both approaches through some numerical experiments for the
spread of an infectious disease.