Highly dynamic animal contact network and implications on disease transmission

Chen, Shi; White, Brad J.; Sanderson, Michael W.; Amrine, David E.; Ilany, Amiyaal; Lanzas, Cristina

A total of four conditions were simulated for comparison and 100 simulations were run for each condition. The first condition (C1) did not use temporal (mean contact number in each hour) nor degree order change, as a baseline scenario representing general model assumptions regarding the contact networks for infectious disease studies, such as constant number of contacts over time and among individuals. That is, if a certain individual had the highest contact number (degree order) at the first time interval (h) in the network, it would remain the most active during the entire period of the simulation. In this condition, individual variability still existed (however, the mean hourly contact number remained the same through simulation) and individual variability was simulated by the variance of the aggregated total observations across all three pens (69 animals) at that time interval; such variability determined the individual ranks. In contrast, condition C4 was simulated with both temporal network degree distribution and degree order changes to investigate the effects of these two sources of variability.