Evaluation of an analytic, approximate formula for the time-varying SIS prevalence in different networks

One of the most important quantities of the exact Markovian SIS epidemic process is the time-dependent prevalence, which is the average fraction of infected nodes. Unfortunately, the Markovian SIS epidemic model features an exponentially increasing computational complexity with growing network size N . In this paper, we evaluate a recently proposed analytic approximate prevalence function introduced in VanMieghem (2016).We compare the approximate functionwith theN-IntertwinedMean-Field Approximation (NIMFA) and with simulation of the Markovian SIS epidemic process. The results show that the new analytic prevalence function is comparable with other approximate methods. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.