The impact of multiple information on coupled awareness-epidemic dynamics in multiplex networks

Growing interest has emerged in the study of the interplay between awareness and epidemics in multiplex networks. However, previous studies on this issue usually assume that all aware individuals take the same level of precautions, ignoring individual heterogeneity. In this paper, we investigate the coupled awareness-epidemic dynamics in multiplex networks considering individual heterogeneity. Here, the precaution levels are heterogeneous and depend on three types of information: contact information and local and global prevalence information. The results show that contact-based precautions can decrease the epidemic prevalence and augment the epidemic threshold, but prevalence-based precautions, regardless of local or global information, can only decrease the epidemic prevalence. Moreover, unlike previous studies in single-layer networks, we do not find a greater impact of local prevalence information on the epidemic prevalence compared to global prevalence information. In addition, we find that the altruistic behaviors of infected individuals can effectively suppress epidemic spreading, especially when the level of contact-based precaution is high.