Epidemic dynamics on complex networks*

Abstract

Abstract Recently, motivated by the pioneer work in revealing the small-world effect and scale-free property of various real-life networks, many scientists devote themselves to studying complex networks. One of the ultimate goals is to understand how the topological structures affect the dynamics upon networks. In this paper, we give a brief review on the studies of epidemic dynamics on complex networks, including by description of classical epidemic models, the epidemic spread on small-world and scale-free networks, and network immunization. Finally, perspectives and some interesting problems are proposed. * Supported National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 70471033, 10472116, and 70271070), and the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (Grant No. 20020358009)