New Letter in Nature Physics
Laurent Hébert-Dufrense, Samuel Scarpino, and I just published a letter where we argue that interacting contagions look like complex contagions. Sune Lehmann wrote a great perspective piece that explains our work and its implication really well. In a nutshell, we show that one can’t use macroscopic patterns to prove that a contagion is “complex” — simpler mechanistic explanations, like interacting simple contagions, give rise to the same patterns. The upshot is that models of complex contagions are much more tractable than the corresponding models of interacting contagions. Hence, our mapping provides a tractable method to fit models of interacting contagion, and a characterization of their complexity. I have made all the code, slides and material available online; see the following link!