Virus information interactive spreading with information attenuation on multiplex networks

Abstract

Controlling the virus spreading in complex networks is very important to the research fields ranging from social science to technology. However, recent researches only consider information transmission and virus spreading as independent and uncorrelated, which neglect their interactive process in real systems. To study the interactive process between information transmission and virus spreading, in this paper, we propose a new virus information interactive spreading model on multiplex network. The multiplex networks can be divided into information transmission layer and virus spreading layer. The interactive spreading model considers the inherent characteristics of information by introducing the information forgetting and information loss mechanisms. Specially, by utilizing the mean field theory, the information transmission and virus process are unified to deduce the critical threshold of virus breakout. It shows that the critical threshold is not only related to the spreading properties of virus, but also influenced by the information density of individuals. We also find that the critical threshold is independent of the information generation probability, and the loss of the information will lead to a decrease. Finally, to verify the theoretical derivations, we apply it on both artificial network and real social network. The experimental results show that the simulations perfectly coincide with theoretical results, which verified the effectiveness of our model.