Interacting opinion and disease dynamics in multiplex networks

FATIMA VELÁSQUEZ; FEDERICO VAZQUEZ

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; STATPHYS 27; 2019

Opinion formation and disease spreading are two of the most studied dynamical processes on complex networks. These two processes have been explored independently of one another for the last decades, and many of their propagation properties on diverse complex topologies are well established already. However, less attention has been paid to a possible case scenario where the dynamics of opinions interact with that of the disease spreading. With the aim of exploring the effects of one dynamical process over the other we study the dynamics of the voter model for opinion formation intertwined with that of the contact process for disease spreading, in a population of individuals that interact via two types of connections, social and contact. These two interacting dynamics take place on two layers of networks, coupled through a fraction q of links present in both networks. We find that the opinion dynamics has striking consequences on the statistical properties of disease spreading: the smooth (continuous) transition from a healthy to an endemic phase observed in the contact process in a single isolated layer (q=0) becomes abrupt (discontinuous) when the two layers are coupled (q>0). This abrupt transition means that if the system is just below the transition point in the healthy phase (zero infected individuals), a small increment in the infection rate would lead to a large number of infected individuals, unlike it happens in an isolated network where the number of infections would be small. Therefore, disregarding the effects of social dynamics on epidemics propagation may lead to a misestimation of the real magnitude of the spreading. Furthermore, we find that the disease dynamics delays the opinion consensus, leading to a mean consensus time that varies nonmonotonically with q in a large range of the model´s parameters. A mean-field approach reveals that the coupled dynamics of opinions and disease can be approximately described by the dynamics of the voter model decoupled from that of the contact process, with effective probabilities of opinion and disease transmission.