Who is the infector? General multi-type epidemics and real-time susceptibility processes

Abstract

We couple a multi-type stochastic epidemic process with a directed random graph, where edges have random lengths. This random graph representation is used to characterise the fractions of individuals infected by the different types of vertices among all infected individuals in the large population limit. For this characterisation we rely on theory of multi-type real-time branching processes. We identify a special case of the two-type model, in which the fraction of individuals of a certain type infected by individuals of the same type, is maximised among all two-type epidemics approximated by branching processes with the same mean offspring matrix.