+4,Aura Raulo,,,"Probabilistic models for complex spreading processes in contact networks – examples from microbiome transmission Many things spread in social contact networks – microbes, information, memes – and many methods exist for tracking the spread of these agents across networks. However, spreading agents rarely spread alone – social contact can function as a way to spread whole communities of microbes, or whole sets of ideas. Much fewer tools exist to describe complex spreading processes of sets of things spreading in parallel in the same networks. A good example of this kind of spreading set is the gut microbiome, our internal ecosystem of hundreds of healthy microbial species that, just like disease, can spread from individual to another in social contact. Social transmission of healthy gut microbiomes offers a great system to develop new models of complex spread Here I will introduce a Probabilistic modeling framework for studying complex spreading processes, based on data on contact networks and distribution of shared elements in a population of interacting individuals. This model predicts frequency of shared elements with frequency of contact among pairs of individuals, using a multimembership random structure to account for dependance among pairwise values. I will show how such a model can be used to reveal the extent of transmission of gut microbiomes in animal social networks and what kind of follow-up research directions it offers, such as: What kind of microbes spread through which kind of contact or what kind of positions in a social network accumulate most diverse set of microbes. ",,
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