Effects of Homophily in Epidemic Processes

We examine how homophily widely observed in networks affects epidemic processes on networks, which are often used to model the spread of information and diseases in social networks and of malware and viruses in information systems. We propose a new framework for modeling the effects of homophily with the help of multi-type branching processes. Using this framework we derive conditions that tell us how homophily influences the likelihood of suffering an epidemic. Finally, we present numerical studies to verify our findings.