Impact of Non-Poissonian Activity Patterns on Spreading Processes

Alexei Vazquez, Balázs Rácz, András Lukács, and Albert-László Barabási
Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 158702 – Published 10 April 2007

Abstract

Halting a computer or biological virus outbreak requires a detailed understanding of the timing of the interactions between susceptible and infected individuals. While current spreading models assume that users interact uniformly in time, following a Poisson process, a series of recent measurements indicates that the intercontact time distribution is heavy tailed, corresponding to a temporally inhomogeneous bursty contact process. Here we show that the non-Poisson nature of the contact dynamics results in prevalence decay times significantly larger than predicted by the standard Poisson process based models. Our predictions are in agreement with the detailed time resolved prevalence data of computer viruses, which, according to virus bulletins, show a decay time close to a year, in contrast with the 1 day decay predicted by the standard Poisson process based models.

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  • Received 27 October 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.158702

©2007 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Alexei Vazquez1, Balázs Rácz2, András Lukács2, and Albert-László Barabási3

  • 1The Simons Center for Systems Biology, Institute of Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA
  • 2Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI), Budapest, Hungary
  • 3Department of Physics and Center for Complex Networks Research, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA

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Issue

Vol. 98, Iss. 15 — 13 April 2007

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