Optimal Vaccination of a General Population Network via Genetic Algorithms
Herein we extend the work from Patel et al. (1) to find the approximate, optimal distribution of vaccinations of a virus spreading on a network with the use of Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We situate our investigation in an online social network, a Facebook graph of ~4000 nodes. Within this framework we investigate the performance of an optimized vaccine distribution scheme against that of a well known heuristic scheme: the vaccination of highly ranked nodes. We include also a baseline scheme of vaccinating random nodes. We show the algorithm is superior to rank scheme in low vaccine coverages, and performs comparably for most other coverage values, lending support to the optimality of this heuristic measure.
epidemiology↗