Network localization is unalterable by infections in bursts

Abstract

To shed light on the disease localization phenomenon, we study a bursty susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model and analyze the model under the mean-field approximation. In the bursty SIS model, the infected nodes infect all their neighbors periodically, and the near-threshold steady-state prevalence is non-constant and maximized by a factor equal to the largest eigenvalue λ1 of the adjacency matrix of the network. We show that the maximum near-threshold prevalence of the bursty SIS process on a localized network tends to zero even if λ1 diverges in the thermodynamic limit, which indicates that the burst of infection cannot turn a localized spreading into a delocalized spreading. Our result is evaluated both on synthetic and real networks.