The spreading phenomenon has characterized for a long time, problems arising from the dis- eases contagion to the diffusion of information [1]. The behaviour of the interacting agents has been usually modelled in two main ways accordingly to the size of the spatial support where the spreading occurs. On one side, we have contact network models where the interact- ing agents are confined in a restricted physical or virtual space where the transmission be- tween individuals in contact with each other. On the other side, we have the meta-population formalism that makes use of reaction-diffusion equations where agents need to migrate be- tween meta-nodes to infect individuals from other spatial patches. In the latter scenario, how- ever, the impact that the topology of the contact network has on the spreading dynamics has been neglected or has merely been quantified through the infection rate only. In this paper, we shed light on the role that the contact networks have on the spreading processes by embed- ding their structure in the meta-population systems creating this way a hybrid extended mod- el, recently known as metaplex [2], that takes into account the topological features of the con- tact processes. Our model is independent of the mean-field approaches that model the contact network dynamics and paves the way to a better understanding of the spreading dynamics in general.
[1] I. Z. Kiss, J. C. Miller, P. L. Simon, Mathematics of Epidemics on Networks, Springer (2017).
[2] E. Estrada, G. Estrada-Rodriguez, H. Gimperlein, SIAM Rev. 62 617 (2020).