A New Parallel Methodology for the Network Analysis of COVID-19 Data

Agapito, Giuseppe; Milano, Marianna; Cannataro, Mario

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak started at Wuhan, China, and it has rapidly spread across the world. In this article, we present a new methodology for network-based analysis of Italian COVID-19 data. The methodology includes the following steps: (i) a parallel methodology to build similarity matrices that represent similar or dissimilar regions with respect to data; (ii) the mapping of similarity matrices into networks where nodes represent Italian regions, and edges represent similarity relationships; (iii) the discovering communities of regions that show similar behaviour. The methodology is general and can be applied to world-wide data about COVID-19. Experiments was performed on real datasets about Italian regions, and they although the limited size of the Italian COVID-19 dataset, a quite linear speed-up was obtained up to six cores.