Influenza epidemic model with dynamic social networks of agents with individual behaviour: A self organize perspective

It’s well known the existence of an interplay between the spread of an infectious disease like influenza and behavioural changes of individuals. An outbreak can trigger behavioural responses, at group and individual levels, which in turn can influence the course of the epidemic. Daily life interactions can be modelled by adaptive temporal networks in an explicit contact space through an agent based model, where each agent represents the interacting individuals. In this paper we introduce an individual based model where the behaviour of each individual is determined both by the external stimuli and its own appreciation of the environment and can be built as a combination of three interacting blocks: i) individual behaviour, ii) social behaviour and iii) epidemic state or epidemiological behaviour. We fit the model for a real influenza epidemic and perform the model validation, comparing the results with the classical approaches.