Simplicial models of social contagion

By Iacopo Iacopini, Giovanni Petri, Alain Barrat, Vito Latora. Nature Communications, 2018

845 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Complex networks have been successfully used to describe the spread of diseases in populations of interacting individuals. Conversely, pairwise interactions are often not enough to characterize social contagion processes such as opinion formation or the adoption of novelties, where complex mechanisms of influence and reinforcement are at work. Here we introduce a higher-order model of social contagion in which a social system is represented by a simplicial complex and contagion can occur through interactions in groups of different sizes. Numerical simulations of the model on both empirical and synthetic simplicial complexes highlight the emergence of novel phenomena such as a discontinuous transition induced by higher-order interactions. We show analytically that the transition is discontinuous and that a bistable region appears where healthy and endemic states co-exist. Our results help explain why critical masses are required to initiate social changes and contribute to the understanding of higher-order interactions in complex systems. Social contagion cannot only be understood in terms of pairwise interactions among individuals. Here, the authors include higher-order social interactions, the effects of groups, in their model of social contagion, enabling insight into why critical masses are required to initiate social changes.

Subfields: Modeling and Simulation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd40d22e6a7ed9a49384f841cd55649ebe6cedaf

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Citations in the corpus

What are higher-order networks? (2021, background): “contagion dynamics on a simplex [43, 86, 145, 151], where the contagion of one node depends on the joint state of two or more nodes, or adaptive voter models with non pairwise interactions and rewiring [149].”
Networks beyond pairwise interactions: structure and dynamics (2020, methodology): “We reviewed explicit examples in which higher-order interactions profoundly change the critical behavior of dynamical processes in both simplicial complexes [68, 134, 262, 319, 376, 394] and hypergraphs [84, 238, 393, 586].”
Higher order interactions in complex networks of phase oscillators promote abrupt synchronization switching (2019, background): “or analysis and computation in high dimensional data sets, e.g., using persistent homologies [15], little is understood about their role in shaping dynamical processes, save for a handful of examples [21, 22]. Using brain dynamics as a motivating application, we study the dynamics of heterogeneous p”
Random Walks on Simplicial Complexes and the normalized Hodge Laplacian (2018, background): “Simplicial models have further been studied from a geometric perspective [17], in terms of epidemic spreading [69], or in the context of extensions of random graph models [41,73,125].”
Dynamics on higher-order networks: a review (2022, background): “[81] formulated a higher-order simplicial model of social contagion.”