Effective edge-based approach for promoting the spreading of SIR model

Promoting spreading dynamics in networked systems is of both theoretical and practical importance. In this study, we propose an effective edge-based approach for promoting the spreading dynamics of the susceptible-infected-recovered model on complex networks by adding connections that do not exist in the original networks. Specifically, we first quantify the influence of each latent edge (that is, each edge that does not exist or activated before) by a mathematical model. Then, we strategically add the latent edges to the original networks according to the influence of each latent edge. It should be mentioned that our strategy incorporates both the information of network structure and spreading dynamics. We verify the effectiveness of our strategy by extensive numerical simulations and prove that our strategy outperforms those approaches that only consider the network structure. Besides, the theoretical framework established in this study provides inspirations for the further investigations of edge-based promoting strategies for other spreading models.