The spatiotemporal analysis of the population migration network in China, 2021

Population migration is a critical component of large-scale spatiotemporal models of infectious disease transmission. Identifying the most influential spreaders in networks is vital to controlling and understanding the spreading process of infectious diseases. We used Baidu Migration data for the whole year of 2021 to build mobility networks. The nodes of the network represent cities, and the edges represent the population flow between cities. By applying the k-shell decomposition and the Louvain algorithm, we could get the k-shell values for each city and community partition. Then, we identified the most efficient nodes or pathways in a complex network by generating random networks. Furthermore, we analyzed the eigenvalue of the migration matrix to find the nodes that have the most impact on the network. We also found the consistency between k-shell value and eigenvalue through Kendall's $$ test. The main result is that in Spring Festival and National Day, the network is at higher risk of an infectious disease outbreak and the Yangtze River Delta is at the highest risk of an epidemic all year around. Shanghai is the most significant node in both k-shell value and eigenvalue analysis. The spatiotemporal property of the network should be taken into account to model the transmission of infectious diseases more accurately.