Predicting and controlling infectious disease epidemics using temporal networks

Abstract

Infectious diseases can be considered to spread over social networks of people or animals. Mainly owing to the development of data recording and analysis techniques, an increasing amount of social contact data with time stamps has been collected in the last decade. Such temporal data capture the dynamics of social networks on a timescale relevant to epidemic spreading and can potentially lead to better ways to analyze, forecast, and prevent epidemics. However, they also call for extended analysis tools for network epidemiology, which has, to date, mostly viewed networks as static entities. We review recent results of network epidemiology for such temporal network data and discuss future developments. © 2013 Faculty of 1000 Ltd.