Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks
arXiv:1004.4792 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012948
Abstract
Current methods for the detection of contagious outbreaks give contemporaneous information about the course of an epidemic at best. Individuals at the center of a social network are likely to be infected sooner, on average, than those at the periphery. However, mapping a whole network to identify central individuals whom to monitor is typically very difficult. We propose an alternative strategy that does not require ascertainment of global network structure, namely, monitoring the friends of randomly selected individuals. Such individuals are known to be more central. To evaluate whether such a friend group could indeed provide early detection, we studied a flu outbreak at Harvard College in late 2009. We followed 744 students divided between a random group and a friend group. Based on clinical diagnoses, the progression of the epidemic in the friend group occurred 14.7 days (95% C.I. 11.7-17.6) in advance of the randomly chosen group (i.e., the population as a whole). The friend group also showed a significant lead time (p<0.05) on day 16 of the epidemic, a full 46 days before the peak in daily incidence in the population as a whole. This sensor method could provide significant additional time to react to epidemics in small or large populations under surveillance. Moreover, the method could in principle be generalized to other biological, psychological, informational, or behavioral contagions that spread in networks.
References in corpus (6)
Cited by in corpus (61)
- Epidemic processes in complex networks
- Statistical physics of vaccination
- The Majority Illusion in Social Networks
- Control centrality and hierarchical structure in complex networks
- Edge-Based Compartmental Modeling for Infectious Disease Spread Part I: An Overview
- Spreading dynamics in complex networks
- Absence of influential spreaders in rumor dynamics
- A measure of individual role in collective dynamics
- Suppressing Epidemics with a Limited Amount of Immunization Units
- Performance of Social Network Sensors During Hurricane Sandy
- The effectiveness of backward contact tracing in networks
- Generalized friendship paradox in complex networks: The case of scientific collaboration
- Tail-scope: Using friends to estimate heavy tails of degree distributions in large-scale complex networks
- Networkcontrology
- From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis
- Epidemiologically optimal static networks from temporal network data
- Qualities and Inequalities in Online Social Networks through the Lens of the Generalized Friendship Paradox
- Fast influencers in complex networks
- Mining social media data for biomedical signals and health-related behavior
- Three faces of node importance in network epidemiology: Exact results for small graphs
- Immunization Strategies Based on the Overlapping Nodes in Networks with Community Structure
- Beyond ranking nodes: Predicting epidemic outbreak sizes by network centralities
- Individual-based approach to epidemic processes on arbitrary dynamic contact networks
- Efficient detection of contagious outbreaks in massive metropolitan encounter networks
- Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks and Human Behavior
- Spreading paths in partially observed social networks
- Connected but Segregated: Social Networks in Rural Villages
- What Do Your Friends Think? Efficient Polling Methods for Networks Using Friendship Paradox
- Empirical studies on the network of social groups: the case of Tencent QQ
- Objective measures for sentinel surveillance in network epidemiology
- Generalized friendship paradox in networks with tunable degree-attribute correlation
- Detecting the Influence of Spreading in Social Networks with Excitable Sensor Networks
- Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes
- Evaluating stochastic seeding strategies in networks
- On the Efficiency of the Information Networks in Social Media
- Benefits of Bias: Towards Better Characterization of Network Sampling
- Tuning the average path length of complex networks and its influence to the emergent dynamics of the majority-rule model
- On the effect of the path length and transitivity of small-world networks on epidemic dynamics
- Seeding with Costly Network Information
- Power-law weighted networks from local attachments
- Social Sensor Placement in Large Scale Networks: A Graph Sampling Perspective
- Detecting weak changes in dynamic events over networks
- Forecasting the Flu: Designing Social Network Sensors for Epidemics
- Studying Diffusion of Viral Content at Dyadic Level
- Quickest Detection of Dynamic Events in Networks
- Studying Paths of Participation in Viral Diffusion Process
- Contextual Centrality: Going Beyond Network Structures
- Degree distributions under general node removal: Power-law or Poisson?
- Which friends are more popular than you? Contact strength and the friendship paradox in social networks
- Leveraging Sociological Models for Predictive Analytics
- Limits of Friendship Networks in Predicting Epidemic Risk
- Effectiveness of Alter Sampling in Social Networks
- Parameter estimation for contact tracing in graph-based models
- Node-based Generalized Friendship Paradox fails
- Network structure and disease risk for an endemic infectious disease
- VICSOM: VIsual Clues from SOcial Media for psychological assessment
- Wiggins: Detecting Valuable Information in Dynamic Networks Using Limited Resources
- Contagions in Social Networks: Effects of Monophilic Contagion, Friendship Paradox and Reactive Networks
- Epidemics on critical random graphs with heavy-tailed degree distribution
- Early Warning Analysis for Social Diffusion Events
- Efficient vaccination strategies for epidemic control using network information