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
Journal ArticleDOI
Immunization for scale-free networks by random walker ∗
TL;DR: This work proposes two types of immunization strategies which require only local connectivity information and demonstrates that these strategies can lead to the eradication of the epidemic by immunizing a small fraction of the nodes in the networks.
Journal ArticleDOI
Agent-based and phylogenetic analyses reveal how HIV-1 moves between risk groups: injecting drug users sustain the heterosexual epidemic in Latvia.
TL;DR: It is shown that social heterogeneity of the susceptible population can explain the shift in HIV-1 incidence in Latvia over the course of the epidemic, and the decrease in IDU incidence may be due to local heterogeneities in transmission, rather than the implementation of control measures.
Book ChapterDOI
Network models in epidemiology: an overview
Alun L. Lloyd,Steve Valeika +1 more
TL;DR: This paper focuses on threshold conditions, which describe when invasion and persistence of an infection is possible and the ‘mass-action’ description of transmission, which will be discussed in detail below.
Journal ArticleDOI
A spatial network explanation for a hierarchy of urban power laws
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors formulate a model of geographic activity distribution with spatial correlations on the level of land lots where multiplicative growth is assumed to be dominant but not exclusive, and reproduce statistical properties of an empirical geographical distribution of land values on multiple hierarchical levels.
Journal ArticleDOI
Relation between structure and size in social networks.
Luis López,Miguel A. F. Sanjuán +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown that there exists a close relationship between the structure of the network and its maximum size and an average coordination degree for the network is defined, which can be associated with a certain notion of efficiency.
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.