Identifying influential links to control spreading of epidemics

Abstract

In recent years, epidemics have been raging around the world, causing serious harm to human health, and controlling the spread of the epidemics has become a hot topic. The study of network partition is of great practical significance to control the spread of the epidemics. Network partition is an NP hard problem. Much work has focused on identifying important nodes in complex networks to achieve network partition. Similarly, understanding the importance of links in spreading dynamics in a network can provide ways to hinder or slow down ongoing dynamical phenomena like the spreading of epidemic or the diffusion of information. This paper studies the algorithms to identify influential links in complex networks. Deleting some influential links can divide the network into some components so as to prevent effectively the spreading processes in epidemics. Our algorithms can successfully identify influential links at low computational cost by utilizing the eigenvector centrality measures. The simulated results in some real-world social networks and synthetic networks show that our algorithms are effective. The number of infected individuals can be remarkable reduced by removing influential links.