Nicholas Landry
London E1W 1YW, UK
Portland, ME 04101
2nd floor
11th floor
Boston, MA 02115
2nd floor
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
In contrast to the assumption that social interactions only involve two individuals when modeling complex systems, larger interactions often occur in empirical settings. The collection of these group interactions form a higher-order interaction network, also known as a hypergraph. Dynamics on these higher-order networks can produce rich behavior, even for very simple models of contagion. We present two different contagion models: one representing social contagion and the other describing epidemiological contagion. For the social contagion model, we focus on the interplay between higher-order structure and the resulting contagion dynamics of a hypergraph SIS model; in particular, we describe how degree heterogeneity and community structure can affect the onset and existence of tipping-point behavior and polarization. For the epidemiological model, we describe a reality-inspired model of environmentally-mediated contagion and present a method to infer network structure and epidemiological parameters from time-series data. We discuss initial work and challenges applying this model to transmission of C. diff in a hospital setting.