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Prediction of the disease controllability in a complex network using machine learning algorithms

The application of machine learning (ML) techniques span a vast spectrum ranging from speech, face and character recognition, medical diagnosis, anomaly detection in data to the general classification, prediction, and regression problems. In the present work, we solve the problem of predicting R_0 for disease spreading on complex networks using the regression-based state-of-art ML techniques. R_0 is a metric that determines whether the disease-free epidemic or an endemic state is asymptotically stable and hence indicates the controllability of the disease spread. We predict R_0 , based on training the ML models with structural properties of complex networks, irrespective of the network type. The prediction is possible because: (a) The structure of complex networks plays an essential role in the spreading processes on networks (b) The regression techniques such as Support Vector Regression and Artificial Neural Network Model can be very efficiently used for prediction problems, even for non-linear data. We obtained good accuracy in the prediction of R_0 for the simulated networks as well as real-world networks using these techniques. Moreover, the ML model training is a one-time investment cost in terms of training time and memory, and the trained model can be used for predicting R_0 on unseen/new examples of networks.