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Summary: Fitting Contact Networks to Epidemic Behavior
with an Evolutionary Algorithm
Daniel Ashlock and Elisabeth Shiller
Abstract-- Epidemic models often incorporate contact net-
works along which the disease can be passed. This study
incorporates a restarting-recentering evolutionary algorithm,
previously developed to locate extremal epidemic networks,
together with a new representation, the toggle-delete representa-
tion, for evolvable networks. The goal is to locate networks that
were likely to have produced a given epidemic behavior. This
goal subsumes a new fitness function for driving selection in
network evolution. Earlier representations used networks with
a fixed sequence of contact numbers. The new representation
can add and remove edges from the network, permitting a
search that varies contact numbers within the network. A
parameter setting study is performed on an epidemic profile
obtained from an random network and then tested on a bimodal
profile invented by the researchers. The algorithm succeeds in
producing networks that cause epidemics run on them to mimic
the specified epidemic profiles.
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