Epidemic spreading on networks with overlapping community structure

Many real networks are characterized by overlapping community structures in which vertices may belong to more than one community. In this paper, we propose a network model with overlapping community structure. The analytical and numerical results show that the connectivity distribution of this network follows a power law. We employ this network to investigate the impact of overlapping community structure on susceptible–infected–susceptible (SIS) epidemic spreading process. The simulation results indicate that significant overlapping community structure results in a major infection prevalence and leads to a peak of the spread velocity in the early stages of the emerging infection.