Epidemic spreading on coupling network with higher-order information layer

Abstract

Epidemic tends to break out with information spreading which occurs between pairwise individuals or in groups. In active social online platform, three or more individuals can share information or exchange opinion, which could be modeled as a clique beyond pairwise interaction. This work studies the influence of information with higher-order cliques whose closure probability is described by higher-order clustering coefficient on epidemic spreading. The coupled spreading process of disease and awareness follows an unaware-aware-unaware-susceptible-infected-susceptible model on multiplex networks. We deduce the epidemic threshold of multiplex network with higher-order cliques, and explore the effects of cliques on epidemic spreading process at slow, middle and fast pairwise information spreading rates. The results show that the epidemic threshold and higher-order clustering coefficient are positively correlated. Moreover, we find that the effect of higher-order cliques could be ignored when pairwise information spreading rate is large enough. Finally, we show that the steady infection ratio decreases with the increase of the higher-order clustering coefficient.