Epidemic threshold for the SIS model on networks

Roni Parshani, Shai Carmi, Shlomo Havlin

Published 2009-09-21, updated 2010-07-14Version 2

We derive an analytical expression for the critical infection rate r_c of the susceptible-infectious-susceptible (SIS) disease spreading model on random networks. To obtain r_c, we first calculate the probability of reinfection, pi, defined as the probability of a node to reinfect the node that had earlier infected it. We then derive r_c from pi using percolation theory. We show that pi is governed by two effects: (i) The requirement from an infecting node to recover prior to its reinfection, which depends on the disease spreading parameters; and (ii) The competition between nodes that simultaneously try to reinfect the same ancestor, which depends on the network topology.