Giuseppe
Emeritus
[Source: PLoS ONE, full text: (LINK). Abstract, edited.]
------
Quasi-Neutral Theory of Epidemic Outbreaks
Oscar A. Pinto et al.
by Oscar A. Pinto, Miguel A. Mu?oz
Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for ?accidental pathogens? which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way.
-Oscar A. Pinto et al.
by Oscar A. Pinto, Miguel A. Mu?oz
Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for ?accidental pathogens? which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way.
------