Winning the competition: enhancing counter-contagion in SIS-like epidemic processes

In this paper we consider the epidemic competition between two generic diffusion processes, where each competing side is represented by a different state of a stochastic process. For this setting, we present the Generalized Largest Reduction in Infectious Edges (gLRIE) dynamic resource allocation strategy to advantage the preferred state against the other. Motivated by social epidemics, we apply this method to a generic continuous-time SIS-like diffusion model where we allow for: i) arbitrary node transition rate functions that describe the dynamics of propagation depending on the network state, and ii) competition between the healthy (positive) and infected (negative) states, which are both diffusive at the same time, yet mutually exclusive on each node. Finally we use simulations to compare empirically the proposed gLRIE against competitive approaches from literature.