Synthesis and refinement of detailed subnetworks in a social contact network for epidemic simulations

Abstract

In recent years, individual based epidemic simulations on synthetic social contact networks have been proved useful in supporting public health epidemiology. In use of such models, it is often desirable to understand how disease spreads through a small subset of the population; furthermore often data is available that allows us to develop more refined representations of social contact networks that span these sub-populations. Examples include: schools, office campuses, military bases, etc. Here, we develop a multi-level refinement and analysis technique to synthesize and embed subnetworks of an existing contact network when more detailed activity data about a small community is available. The methodology is illustrated by embedding detailed high school networks in a synthetic social contact network of the New River Valley, Virginia. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.