No abstract

A model based on a thermodynamic approach is proposed for predicting the dynamics of communicable epidemics assumed to be governed by controlling efforts of multiple scales so that an entropy is associated with the system. All the epidemic details are factored into a single and time-dependent coefficient, the functional form of this coefficient is found through four constraints, including notably the existence of an inflexion point and a maximum. The model is solved to give a log-normal distribution for the spread rate, for which a Shannon entropy can be defined. The only parameter, that characterizes the width of the distribution function, is uniquely determined through maximizing the rate of entropy production. This entropy-based thermodynamic (EBT) model predicts the number of hospitalized cases with a reasonable accuracy for SARS in the year 2003. This EBT model can be of use for potential epidemics such as avian influenza and H7N9 in China. epidemics, entropy, inflexion point PACS number(s): 02.90.+p, 05.90.+m, 89.90.+n Citation: Wang W B, Wu Z N, Wang C F, et al. Modelling the spreading rate of controlled communicable epidemics through an entropy-based thermodynamic model.

Network anomaly detection has become very popular in recent years because of the importance of discovering key regions of structural inconsistency in the network. In addition to application-specific information carried by anomalies, the presence of such structural inconsistency is often an impediment to the effective application of data mining algorithms such as community detection and classification. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting structurally inconsistent nodes that connect to a number of diverse influential communities in large social networks. We show that the use of a network embedding approach, together with a novel dimension reduction technique, is an effective tool to discover such structural inconsistencies. We also experimentally show that the detection of such anomalous nodes has significant applications: one is the specific use of detected anomalies, and the other is the improvement of the effectiveness of community detection.