Immunization Strategies in Networks with Missing Data

Network-based intervention strategies can be effective and cost-efficient approaches to curtailing harmful contagions in myriad settings. As studied, these strategies are often impractical to implement, as they typically assume complete knowledge of the network structure, which is unusual in practice. In this paper, we investigate how different immunization strategies perform under realistic conditions—where the strategies are informed by partially-observed network data. Our results suggest that global immunization strategies, like degree immunization, are optimal in most cases; the exception is at very high levels of missing data, where stochastic strategies, like acquaintance immunization, begin to outstrip them in minimizing outbreaks. Stochastic strategies are more robust in some cases due to the different ways in which they can be affected by missing data. In fact, one of our proposed variants of acquaintance immunization leverages a logistically-realistic ongoing survey-intervention process as a form of targeted data-recovery to improve with increasing levels of missing data. These results support the effectiveness of targeted immunization as a general practice. They also highlight the risks of considering networks as idealized mathematical objects: overestimating the accuracy of network data and foregoing the rewards of additional inquiry.
Author summary It is often useful to track how epidemics spread through populations by mapping transmissions between people, communities, and cities. This consideration of a population as a network can reveal the critical players, locations, or events driving epidemics. Similarly, by mapping the network of possible transmissions before an outbreak occurs, we can identify potentially critical actors on which public health interventions should focus. Unfortunately, the data collection process required to map all possible interactions of a population is difficult—fraught with possible error and unlikely to be complete. To understand the role of data quality in network-based interventions, we apply different strategies to partially-observed networks with controllable amounts of missing data. Our results suggest that intervention strategies which require full network information remain fairly effective up to high levels of missing data. However, local strategies which rely only on small data samples can outperform the more data-expensive benchmark strategies when little data is available. Surprisingly, we also propose an intervention that improves in effectiveness with less data by coupling targeted immunization with targeted data recovery. These results show that insights from network science can be robust to missing data, but that their implementation should be adjusted for noisy real-world applications.