1.
Phys Rev Lett
; 114(24): 248701, 2015 Jun 19.
Artigo
em Inglês
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-26197016
RESUMO
Detection of patient zero can give new insights to epidemiologists about the nature of first transmissions into a population. In this Letter, we study the statistical inference problem of detecting the source of epidemics from a snapshot of spreading on an arbitrary network structure. By using exact analytic calculations and Monte Carlo estimators, we demonstrate the detectability limits for the susceptible-infected-recovered model, which primarily depend on the spreading process characteristics. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the approach in a case of a simulated sexually transmitted infection spreading over an empirical temporal network of sexual interactions.