{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/thermodynamic-efficiency-of-contagions-a","title":"Thermodynamic efficiency of contagions: A statistical mechanical analysis of the SIS epidemic model","arxiv_id":"1806.08504","date":"2018-10-22","proceeding":null,"authors":[],"abstract":"We present a novel approach to the study of epidemics on networks as\nthermodynamic phenomena, considering the thermodynamic efficiency of\ncontagions, considered as distributed computational processes. Modelling SIS\ndynamics on a contact network statistical-mechanically, we follow the Maximum\nEntropy principle to obtain steady state distributions and derive, under\ncertain assumptions, relevant thermodynamic quantities both analytically and\nnumerically. In particular, we obtain closed form solutions for some cases,\nwhile interpreting key epidemic variables, such as the reproductive ratio $R_0$\nof a SIS model, in a statistical mechanical setting. On the other hand, we\nconsider configuration and free entropy, as well as the Fisher Information, in\nthe epidemiological context. This allowed us to identify criticality and\ndistinct phases of epidemic processes. For each of the considered thermodynamic\nquantities, we compare the analytical solutions informed by the Maximum Entropy\nprinciple with the numerical estimates for SIS epidemics simulated on\nWatts-Strogatz random graphs.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08504v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.08504v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"thermodynamic-efficiency-of-contagions-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/NathanHarding/Therm-eff-cont","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}