Impact of the distribution of recovery rates on disease spreading in complex networks

Abstract

We study a general epidemic model with arbitrary recovery rate distributions. This simple deviation from the standard setup is sufficient to prove that heterogeneity in the dynamical parameters can be as important as the more studied structural heterogeneity. Our analytical solution is able to predict the shift in the critical properties induced by heterogeneous recovery rates. We find that the critical value of infectivity tends to be smaller than the one predicted by quenched mean-field approaches in the homogeneous case and that it can be linked to the variance of the recovery rates. Our findings also illustrate the role of dynamical-structural correlations, where we allow a power-law network to dynamically behave as a homogeneous structure by an appropriate tuning of its recovery rates. Overall, our results demonstrate that heterogeneity in the recovery rates, eventually in all dynamical parameters, is as important as the structural heterogeneity.