Weighted Metapath Projection for SIR Epidemic Modeling on Tripartite Networks

• João Gabriel Melo Barbirato USP
• Alneu de Andrade Lopes USP

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/eniac.2026.31261

Resumo

Diffusion models are a set of rules that describe the dynamics of information spread. Despite many proposed methods, few have extended these structures to tripartite networks. To address this gap, this work proposes an SIR model for tripartite networks by projecting the tripartite graph onto a weighted unipartite graph with a metapath. After testing on 150 synthetic small networks, results show that an adaptive projection significantly outperforms both the global and naive approaches in node rank correlation with ODE output. A spectral analysis shows that all three approaches agree on identifying influential spreaders. An exploratory comparison of epidemic thresholds suggests differences across methods, though this result may be biased by graph size.

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