An Immunity Placement Method for Suppressing Spread of Viruses

Abstract

The spread of viruses, such as flu and SARS, can be modeled using social networks. In this study, we modeled the spread of a virus in a social network and attempted to suppress the virus by immunizing nodes. Although a suppression method for virus diffusion using only local information has been proposed, we proposed a new suppression method using degree and the importance of lines centrality. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method for scale-free networks. In addition, we investigated whether our proposed method is valid for various types of social networks. In numerical experiments, the proposed method showed better performance than the conventional suppression method.