Effective Methods of Restraining Diffusion in Terms of Epidemic Dynamics

Abstract

Removing influential nodes or shortcuts in a network restrains epidemic or information diffusion, but this method destroys the connectivity of the network and changes the topological structure. As an alternative, an additional field can be imposed in the network to affect node behaviors and slow down diffusion dynamics. However, little research has been performed systematically to analyze and compare these methods. This paper investigates epidemic dynamics and proposes the following four methods to restrain the diffusion process: blocking nodes, blocking edges, distracting node attention, and propagating opposite information. We compare differences in the actions of these methods, and investigate their joint effects. Through numerical experiments in a scale-free network and a real network, we observe that these methods change the spreading threshold and final extent with different conditions. The method of blocking nodes is more efficient and economical than blocking edges. Propagating opposite information can effectively prevent diffusion of target information that has a large spreading rate, whereas distracting node attention only takes effect for the information with a small rate. Meanwhile, the effects of these two methods mainly depend on their action time. From the joint effects, we can select the optimal method for different situations.