In epidemiology, contact tracing is a process to control the spread of an infectious disease and identify individuals who were previously exposed to patients with the disease. After the emergence of AIDS, SNA was demonstrated to be a good supplementary tool for contact tracing [1]. Traditionally, social networks for disease investigation are constructed only with personal contacts since personal contacts are the most identifiable paths for disease transmission. However, for diseases which transmit not only through personal contacts, incorporating geographical contacts into SNA has been demonstrated to reveal potential contacts among patients [2][3].
Objective
In this research, we aim to investigate the necessity of incorporating geographical contacts into Social Network Analysis (SNA) for contact tracing in epidemiology and explore the strengths of multi-mode networks with patients and geographical locations in network visualization for disease spread investigation.