Mathematics of epidemics on networks. From exact to approximate models (Q502355)

The significance of network science has increased in the past 15 years. Some phenomena have caused this. The blackout of Italy 2003 and the SARS epidemic in 2003 showed the need for the study of networks. The financial crisis 2008 has pointed out the relation between network science and economy. SARS indicated the need to generalize cellular automata to small world networks (SWN). Afterwards, more generalizations of epidemics to networks have been established. Therefore this book is quite timely. This book sets out to make a contribution to modelling epidemics on networks by synthesising a large pool of models ranging from exact and stochastic to approximate differential equations models. The first chapter introduces the reader to the fundamentals of disease transmission models and the underlying networks. Chapter 2 takes a rigorous probabilistic view and frames disease transmission on a network as a continuous time Markov chain. In contrast, Chapter 3 builds a hierarchy of models starting at the node level which depend on the node-neighbour pairs, which in turn depend on triples formed by considering the next-nearest neighbours. Chapter 4 focuses on mean-field and pairwise models and their analysis on homogeneous networks. Chapter 5 extends approaches of Chapter 4 to heterogeneous networks and introduces effective degree models. In Chapter 6, the focus is primarily on SIR epidemics, and percolation theory methods are used to derive the low-dimensional edge-based compartmental model. Chapter 7 brings the different SIR models together, showing that under reasonable assumptions the high-dimensional models of earlier chapters reduce to the low-dimension model of Chapter 6. Chapter 8 extends the earlier models to account for the simultaneous spread of the disease and change in the network, considering several scenarios for how networks vary in time. Chapter 9 generalises the pairwise and edge-based compartmental models to non-Markovian epidemics leading to integro and delay differential equations. Chapter 10 starts from a Markov chain to derive the Fokker-Planck equation for the distribution of the number of infected individuals as a function of time and uses the resulting partial differential equation to investigate epidemic processes. Finally, Chapter 11 shows that these models can perform surprisingly well even in networks, including empirically observed networks, for which the assumptions they are based on do not appear to be satisfied. The Appendix gives simulation algorithms and discusses issues encountered in simulating epidemics in networks. In this reviewer's opinion, this book misses two important topics, namely, superspreaders [\textit{M. Small} et al., Physica D 215, No. 2, 146--158 (2006; Zbl 1095.92064)] and multistrain diseases [\textit{J. Sanz} et al., ``Dynamics of interacting diseases'', Phys. Rev. X 4, No. 4, Article ID 041005, 22 p. (2014; \url{doi:10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041005})].