Adaptive Networks Foundations: Modeling, Dynamics, and Applications

Abstract

Abstract : We are studying adaptive social networks, focusing on spread of infectious disease as our primary example and including terrorist recruitment as an additional example. In an adaptive network, individuals change their social connections in response to their neighbors' characteristics, and these changes in network topology affect subsequent properties of the individuals. The network adaptation can be disease avoidance or connecting to potential recruits. Major goals of the project included extending previous models to incorporate more realistic network structure, adding spread of information that affects human behavior, studying the extinction of diseases, developing control strategies for epidemics on adaptive networks, and developing tools to analyze and monitor adaptive network properties. We have extended models to include network community structure, information spread, and more realistic social adaptation. We developed the first adaptive network model for terrorist recruitment. Our analytic work includes new techniques for predicting extinction rates of epidemics and the trajectory to extinction, methods to apply this to extinction on a network, and new moment closure approximation techniques that lead to more accurate predictions. For monitoring and control, we developed a method to quantify network adaptation and studied vaccine control for epidemics in adaptive networks.