Creating real-social contact networks from statistically aggregated information

C.LAGORIO; M. V. MIGUELES; L. A. BRAUNSTEIN; P. A. MACRI; E. LÓPEZ

Department of Mathematics and Statistics University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Workshop; LAAZ ASUNM Daze 2008; 2008

Social and infectious disease dynamics are critically dependent on the social networks inwhich they occur. However, direct contact data necessary to establish a real social network is notavailable in most cases. Combining real-world statistical information about a population (e.g.distribution of age, children per household, number of working family members, etc.), we introducea method to create social interaction networks of the population which match the input distributions.Using this method, we create network ensembles for the city of Bahia Blanca in Argentina, andmeasure basic network quantities such as the distribution of number of contacts per individual,clustering coefficient, and assortativity of the network. These measures are in agreement with otherwell-established models of population dynamics.