2012 InteractingVirusesinNetworksCan

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Notes

Suppose we have two competing ideas / products / viruses, that propagate over a social or other network. Suppose that they are strong / virulent enough, so that each, if left alone, could lead to an epidemic. What will happen when both operate on the network? Earlier models assume that there is perfect competition: if a user buys product 'A' (or gets infected with virus ' X'), she will never buy product 'B' (or virus 'Y'). This is not always true: for example, a user could install and use both Firefox and Google Chrome as browsers. Similarly, one type of flu may give partial immunity against some other similar disease.

In the case of full competition, it is known that 'winner takes all,' that is the weaker virus / product will become extinct. In the case of no competition, both viruses survive, ignoring each other. What happens in-between these two extremes?

We show that there is a phase transition: if the competition is harsher than a critical level, then ' winner takes all; ' otherwise, the weaker virus survives. These are the contributions of this paper (a) the problem definition, which is novel even in epidemiology literature (b) the phase-transition result and (c) experiments on real data, illustrating the suitability of our results.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2012 InteractingVirusesinNetworksCan	B. Aditya Prakash Christos Faloutsos Alex Beutel Roni Rosenfeld			Interacting Viruses in Networks: Can Both Survive?				10.1145/2339530.2339601		2012