Sensitivity to Temporal and Topological Misinformation in Predictions of Epidemic Outbreaks

Abstract

Structures both in the network of who interact with whom, and the timing of these contacts, affect epidemic outbreaks. In practical applications, such information would frequently be inaccurate. In this work, we explore how the accuracy in the prediction of the final outbreak size and the time to extinction of the outbreak depend on the quality of the contact information. We find a fairly general stretched exponential dependence of the deviation from the true outbreak sizes and extinction times on the frequency of errors in both temporal and topological information.