Paper detail

Spectral analysis and slow spreading dynamics on complex networks

The Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model is one of the simplest memoryless system for describing information/epidemic spreading phenomena with competing creation and spontaneous annihilation reactions. The effect of quenched disorder on the dynamical behavior has recently been compared to quenched mean-field (QMF) approximations in scale-free networks. QMF can take into account topological heterogeneity and clustering effects of the activity in the steady state by spectral decomposition analysis of the adjacency matrix. Therefore, it can provide predictions on possible rare-region effects, thus on the occurrence of slow dynamics. I compare QMF results of SIS with simulations on various large dimensional graphs. In particular, I show that for Erd\H os-Rényi graphs this method predicts correctly the epidemic threshold and the rare-region effects. Griffiths Phases emerge if the graph is fragmented or if we apply strong, exponentially suppressing weighting scheme on the edges. The latter model describes the connection time distributions in the face-to-face experiments. In case of generalized Barabási-Albert type of networks with aging connections strong rare-region effects and numerical evidence for Griffiths Phase dynamics are shown.