ArticlePloS one2011
Quasi-neutral theory of epidemic outbreaks.
Article in PloS one, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Quasicriticality explains variability of human neural dynamics across life span.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Article
- Immune amnesia induced by measles and its effects on concurrent epidemics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Temporal profiles of avalanches on networks.Nature communications · 2017Article
- A measure of individual role in collective dynamics.Scientific reports · 2012Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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