Evolving a social fabric to fit and epidemic profile

Epidemic models often incorporate contact networks along which the disease can be passed. This study follows up on an earlier one which evolved full general contact networks. This study uses an evolvable network representation inspired by the idea of a social fabric. The resulting representation is based on selecting overlapping groups of agents that interact as if they are well mixed. The groups in this representation are intended to represent groups that are, in fact, well mixed such as schools, families, or workplaces. The new representation permits a substantial improvement in the speed with which a contact model can be fit to an epidemic profile. There is a cost in the form of additional model parameters that must be tuned. A parameter setting study is performed for a simple epidemic profile, providing proof of concept for the evolvable social fabric representation. A number of potential improvements and directions for future work are outlined.