What's the best homogeneous mixing approximation to capture an epidemic on a temporal network?

In our recently published paper, we compare an epidemic simulated with a mass-action principle and one simulated on a real network of evolving contacts between hosts. The aim is to identify the best homogeneous mixing approximation to capture the 'real' epidemic unfolding on the time-resolved pattern of contacts.

We find that it is possible to recalibrate the epidemic parameters (reproductive number and recovery rate) of the homogeneous mixing to describe the contact network epidemic with good accuracy in different epidemiological and social contexts. Most importantly, recalibration is found to be linear in the epidemic parameters of the epidemic contact network and independent of changes in groups, group sizes, and total population sizes.

This was a collaboration with Alain Barrat's group in Marseille:
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Recalibrating disease parameters for increasing realism in modeling epidemics in closed settings
L Bioglio, M Génois, CL Vestergaard, C Poletto, A Barrat, V Colizza
BMC Infectious Diseases 16, 676 (2016)