Epidemic spreading in scale-free networks with community structure

Abstract

Many real networks consist of communities: groups of nodes within which connections aredense, but among which connections are sparser. In this paper, based on thesusceptible–infected (SI) model, epidemic prevalence is compared between two kinds ofscale-free network, with and without community structure, which have the same degreedistribution. It is found that networks with strong community structure are helpful forreducing the danger brought by epidemic prevalence in the network, which isshown by the comparison results of the prevalence scale, the variability of theprevalence scale and the average degree of new infected nodes at each time step. Wealso note that when facing networks with strong community structure, specialattention should be paid to nodes that are close to the initial infected seeds.