Physics of epidemics on contact networks with spatial and temporal features

The outbreak of an infectious disease transmitted with close contacts does not only depend on the characteristic of the infection, but also on human-to-human contact behavior. This aspect is difficult to capture in physics model of epidemics because human behavior presents complex patterns: heterogeneities, recurrence, and spatial and temporal correlations. Key statistical features of human contact patterns are being uncovered by the increasing efforts to collect contact data in selected cohorts and analyze them. The theory of temporal networks provides a convenient framework to model the measured contact patterns. The aim of this work is to build a generative model of the temporal network of human contacts, where the features of interest can be turned on and off to inspect their relevance in the dynamics of epidemics. In particular, we address how the network features impact the phase transition between epidemic extinction and invasion, the epidemic dynamics at the early stage and the epidemic final outcome.