Records of social interactions provide us with new sources of data for understanding how interaction patterns affect collective dynamics. Such human activity patterns are often bursty, i.e., they consist of short periods of intense activity followed by long periods of silence. This burstiness has been shown to affect spreading phenomena; it accelerates epidemic spreading in some cases and slows it down in other cases. We investigate a model of history-dependent contagion.

Bursty communication patterns facilitate spreading in a threshold-based epidemic dynamics

Taro Takaguchi, Naoki Masuda, Petter Holme

http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.2097