The Web of Human Sexual Contacts
TLDR
In this article, the authors analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents for females and males.Abstract:
Many ``real-world'' networks are clearly defined while most ``social'' networks are to some extent subjective. Indeed, the accuracy of empirically-determined social networks is a question of some concern because individuals may have distinct perceptions of what constitutes a social link. One unambiguous type of connection is sexual contact. Here we analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents $\alpha \approx 2.4$ for females and males. The scale-free nature of the web of human sexual contacts suggests that strategic interventions aimed at preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases may be the most efficient approach.read more
Citations
More filters
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Fitting contact networks to epidemic behavior with an evolutionary algorithm
Daniel Ashlock,Elisabeth Shiller +1 more
TL;DR: This study incorporates a restarting-recentering evolutionary algorithm, previously developed to locate extremal epidemic networks, together with a new representation, the toggle-delete representation, for evolvable networks, to locate networks that were likely to have produced a given epidemic behavior.
Book ChapterDOI
Estimating Social Network Structure and Propagation Dynamics for an Infectious Disease
TL;DR: This paper applies a parameter estimation method to data collected during the 2009 H1N1 epidemic and shows that the best-fit model, among a family of graphs, admits a scale-free network, implying that random vaccination alone will not efficiently halt the spread of influenza.
Journal ArticleDOI
The small-world dynamics of tree networks and data mining in phyloinformatics
TL;DR: Analyses of tree network connectivity in TreeBASE show that a collection of phylogenetic trees behaves as a small-world network-while on the one hand the trees are clustered, like a non-random lattice, on the other hand they have short characteristic path lengths,like a random graph.
Journal ArticleDOI
The complex network of the Brazilian Popular Music
Denise Maria de Lima e Silva,Márcio M. Soares,M.V.C. Henriques,M.T Schivani Alves,S.G de Aguiar,T.P de Carvalho,Gilberto Corso,Liacir S. Lucena +7 more
TL;DR: The results indicate that the Brazilian Popular Music Network, BPMN, the graph where the vertices are the song writers and the links are determined by the existence of at least a common singer forms a small-world network.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mathematical modeling of the malignancy of cancer using graph evolution.
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that cell-graphs generated for different tissue types evolve differently and that they exhibit different phase properties, which distinguish a tissue type from another, and a novel computational method based on graph evolution process is reported.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Collective dynamics of small-world networks
TL;DR: Simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks ‘rewired’ to introduce increasing amounts of disorder are explored, finding that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks
TL;DR: A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
Journal ArticleDOI
Statistical mechanics of complex networks
TL;DR: In this paper, a simple model based on the power-law degree distribution of real networks was proposed, which was able to reproduce the power law degree distribution in real networks and to capture the evolution of networks, not just their static topology.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Structure and Function of Complex Networks
TL;DR: Developments in this field are reviewed, including such concepts as the small-world effect, degree distributions, clustering, network correlations, random graph models, models of network growth and preferential attachment, and dynamical processes taking place on networks.
Journal ArticleDOI
Complex networks: Structure and dynamics
TL;DR: The major concepts and results recently achieved in the study of the structure and dynamics of complex networks are reviewed, and the relevant applications of these ideas in many different disciplines are summarized, ranging from nonlinear science to biology, from statistical mechanics to medicine and engineering.