The SIR Model and Identification of Spreaders

In this chapter, we review the classic susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model for disease spread as applied to a social network. In particular, we look at the problem of identifying nodes that are “spreaders” which cause a large part of the population to become infected under this model. To do so, we survey a variety of nodal measures based on centrality (degree, betweenness, etc.) and other methods (shell decomposition, nearest neighbor analysis, etc.). We then present a set of experiments that illustrate the relation of these nodal measures to spreading under the SIR model.