Efficient immunization strategies for computer networks and populations.

By R. Cohen, Shlomo Havlin, Daniel ben-Avraham. Physical Review Letters, 2002

1,062 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an effective immunization strategy for computer networks and populations with broad and, in particular, scale-free degree distributions. The proposed strategy, acquaintance immunization, calls for the immunization of random acquaintances of random nodes (individuals). The strategy requires no knowledge of the node degrees or any other global knowledge, as do targeted immunization strategies. We study analytically the critical threshold for complete immunization. We also study the strategy with respect to the susceptible-infected-removed epidemiological model. We show that the immunization threshold is dramatically reduced with the suggested strategy, for all studied cases.

Subfields: Ecology, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc9c8da03a1f411a4050fbf5e1a71836989a0e7c

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Citations in the corpus

Cost-effective outbreak detection in networks (2007, background): “Several strategies for immunization have also been proposed: uniform node immunization, targeted immunization of high degree nodes [20] and acquaintance immunization, which focuses on highly connected nodes [5].”
Dynamics and Control of Diseases in Networks with Community Structure (2010, background): “The only algorithm we are aware of that is completely agnostic about the network structure network structure identifies target nodes by picking a random contact of a randomly chosen individual [42].”
Attack Robustness and Centrality of Complex Networks (2013, background): “References [7–10] study this question in considerable detail, and also discuss the related issue of percolation on networks.”
The structure and dynamics of multilayer networks (2014, background): “A great number of immunization scenarios, such as targeted immunization [264], ring immunization [265], and acquaintance immunization [266], have been proposed, but the majority of them, based on the premise of compulsory requirements, completely neglects the individuals’ willingness and desires, wh”
Mitigation of malicious attacks on networks (2011, background): “[10] Cohen R, Havlin S, ben-Avraham D (2003) Efficient immunization strategies for computer networks and popu-”
Complex systems: Network thinking (2006, neutral): “Cohen, Havlin, and ben-Avraham [8] propose an intriguing public health strategy that employs \network thinking" for vaccination strategies in the face of limited resources: Instead of vaccinating people randomly, ask a large number of people to each name a friend, and vaccinate that friend.”
Statistical physics of vaccination (2016, background): “These degree based strategies consistently require fewer nodes to be vaccinated and as such improve a network’s chances against epidemic attacks [270, 278].”
Simulated Epidemics in an Empirical Spatiotemporal Network of 50,185 Sexual Contacts (2010, background): “ of vaccination protocols where temporal structures could potentially be used to detect important individuals to vaccinate (similar to how network structure can be exploited in vaccination protocols; Cohen et al. 2003). The network-topological correlations, on the other hand, slow down epidemics com”