| The development of quantitative models of outbreaks is key to their eventual control, from human and computer viruses through to social (and antisocial) activities. Standard epidemiological models can reproduce many general features of outbreaks. Unfortunately, the large temporal fluctuations which often dominate real-world data are thought to require more complicated, system-specific models involving super-spreaders, specific social network topologies and rewirings, and birth-death processes. However we show here that these large fluctuations have a generic explanation in terms of underlying community dynamics. Communities increasing (or decreasing) in size, act as instantaneous amplifiers (or suppressors) yielding a complex temporal evolution whose... |
