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The influenza pandemic causes a large number of hospitalizations and even deaths. There is an urgent need for an efficient and effective method for detecting the outbreak of influenza so that timely, appropriate interventions can be made to prevent or at least prepare for catastrophic epidemics. In this study, we proposed a computational method, the shortest-path-based dynamical network marker (SP-DNM), to detect the pre-outbreak state of influenza epidemics by monitoring the dynamical change of the shortest path in a city network. Specifically, by mapping the real-time information to a properly constructed city network, our method detects the early-warning signal prior to the influenza outbreak in both Tokyo and Hokkaido for consecutive 9 years, which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]