Asymptotic Behavior and Stability of Stochastic SIR Model with Variable Diffusion Rates ()
1. Introduction
*Corresponding author.
SIR models are the foundation for a large number of compartmental models in mathematical epidemiology which classify the population into three classes: Susceptible, Infected and Removed (see [1] - [19] ). Generally, these models admit two types of equilibrium: disease free and endemic equilibrium. If the disease free equilibrium is asymptotically stable, it implies the disease dies out. If the endemic equilibrium is asymptotically stable, it implies the disease persists in the population at the equilibrium level.
In 1976, Hethcote [13] considered the following deterministic SIR model with disease deaths:
(1)
In Equation (1),
denote the number of the individuals susceptible to the disease, of infected members and of members who have been removed from the population, respectively. The model (1) is based on the following assumptions:
i) The population considered has a constant size K, that is,
for all t;
ii) Births and deaths occur at equal rates
in K. All the newborns are susceptible.
is called a daily death removal rate;
iii)
is the daily contact rate, i.e., the average number of contacts per infective per day. A contact of an infective is an interaction which results in infection of the other individual if it is susceptible;
iv)
is the daily recovery removal rate of the infective. Of course,
.
In [8] , Beretta and Takeuchi pointed out that when a susceptible vector is infected by a person, there is a time
during which the infectious agents develop in the vector and it is only after that time that the infected vector becomes itself infectious, and proposed the following model
(2)
where
is a non-negative function which is square integrable on
and satisfies
(3)
and the non-negative constant h is the time delay,
can be viewed as the force of infection at time t.
In fact, all infectious diseases are subject to randomness in terms of the nature of transmission. Recently, Tornatore et al. [16] investigate the dynamics of system (2) by perturbing the functional contact rates and modified (2) as:
(4)
where
is a positive constant and W is a real Wiener process defined on a stochastic basis
. They only proved the stability of disease-free equilibrium under some given condition. Along these clues, we propose a stochastic SIR model with deaths and varying contact and recovery rates, where the introduced model covers general diffusion coefficients (functional contact and recovery rates).
In order to make the SIR system (2) more realistic, we consider the case of
and we perturbed the deterministic system (2) by a white noise and obtained a stochastic counterpart by replacing the rates
by
and
by
, and hence we modify the SIR system (2) as the following model:
(5)
where
have the same meaning as model (2),
are real Wiener processes and i.i.d which defined on a filtered complete probability space
. Here, we introduce other two new general stochastic terms: functions
which are locally Lipschitz continuous defined on
Besides, there are deaths due to disease the total population size may vary in time so that we always assume the total population size is less than K in the context, where K represents a carrying capacity. Note that if we consider the population size is a constant K and the disease-related death rate
, besides we also take
(where
is a positive constant), the system (3) becomes the model which has been discussed in [16] . In [16] , Tornatore proved the stability of disease-free equilibrium under some restricted conditions. However, they didn’t consider the dynamics of the endemic equilibrium. It is of great importance from a theoretical point of view to investigate the stability of the endemic equilibrium.
In this paper, we mainly study the stochastic SIR model (5) with distributed delay which has more general diffusion coefficients than model (4)’s. By means of averaged Itô formula and Lyapunov function, we obtain the sufficient conditions for the regularity, existence and uniqueness of a global solution. Furthermore, we also investigate the stochastic asymptotic stability of disease free equilibria and the dynamics of endemic equilibria which has not been discussed in [16] .
The remaining parts of the paper are organized as follows: In Section 2, we will give some basic concepts and conclusions. In Section 3, we employ the averaged Itô formula to obtain the regularity, existence and uniqueness of the global solution of SIR model (5). In Section 4, we derive the sufficient condition to ensure the global stochastic asymptotic stability of disease free equilibrium in SIR model (5), besides we also consider the stochastic asymptotic stability of endemic equilibrium in Section 5. Finally, we illustrate our general results by applications.
2. Some Preliminary Definition and Lemmas
At first, we recall the notation of regularity of continuous time stochastic processes as introduced in [10] . Let
be a fixed closed domain. For Simplicity, we only consider deterministic domains
in this exposition.
Definition 1. A continuous time stochastic process
is called regular on
(or invariant with respect to
) if
otherwise irregular with respect to
(or not invariant with respect to
).
Consider the d-dimensional stochastic differential equation of the form
(6)
with an initial value
where
and
are Borel measurable,
is an
-valued random variable.
Definition 2. The infinitesimal generator
associated with the SDE (6) is given by
Lemma 2.1. (Regularity Theorem [10] ) Let
and
be open sets in
with
and suppose
and
satisfy the existence and uniqueness conditions for solutions of (6) on each set
. Suppose there is a nonnegative continuous function
with continuous partial derivatives and satisfying
for some positive constant
and
,
. Moreover, if
then
for any
independent of
, that is to say the stochastic process
is called regular on
. Regularity on
implies boundedness, uniqueness, continuity and Markov property of the strong solution process
of SDE (6) with
, and
for all
(a.s.).
Definition 3. The equilibrium solution
of the SDE (6) is stochastically stable (stable in probability) if for every
and
where
denotes the solution of (6) satisfying
at time
.
Definition 4. The equilibrium solution
of the SDE (6) is stochastically asymptotically stable (stable in probability) if it is stochastically stable and
Definition 5. The equilibrium solution
of the SDE (6) is said to be globally stochastically asymptotically stable (stable in probability) if it is stochastically stable and for every
and every
Lemma 2.2. ( [4] ) Assume that
and
satisfy locally Lipschitz-continuous and satisfy linear growth condition and they have continuous coefficients with respect to t.
1) Suppose that there exists a positive definite function
, where
for
, such that
Then the equilibrium solution
of (6) is stochastically stable.
2) In addition, if
is descresent (that is to say there exists a positive definite function
such that
for all
) and
is negative definite, then the equilibrium solution
is stochastically asymptotically stable.
3) If the assumptions of part (2) hold for a radially unbounded function
defined everywhere then the equilibrium solution
is globally stochastically asymptotically stable.
3. Existence, Uniqueness and Regularity of Stochastic SIR Model Solution
Theorem 3.1. Let
, and
be independent of s-algebra
. Then, under the condition (A) or (B)
a)
;
b)
;
the stochastic process
governed by Equation (5) is regular on
; i.e. we have
for all
. Moreover, regularity on
implies stochastic SIR model (5) admits a a unique, continuous-time, Markovian global solution process
.
Proof. First we consider the result under the condition of (A). Denote drift term
and the diffusion term
Let open domains
Since Equation (5) is well-defined on
and
, and the coefficients
,
are locally Lipschitz-continuous and satisfy linear growth condition on
, then there exists a unique, bounded and Markovian solution up to random time
(or
), where
(or
represents the random time of the first exit of stochastic process
from the domain
(or
), started in
Math_129# (or
) at the initial time
. To ensure the solution regular, we only prove that
. a.s. Now, we use function
defined on
via
and assume that
. For
, we have
and for
, we have
(7)
Define
as infinitesimal generator as in Definition 2, then calculate
In view of the condition (A) that
, and hence we have
If we take
therefore
due to
for
.
In what follows, to show that
, i.e.,
. Now, introduce a new function
by
, where
is defined as above. And hence
since
. Denote
and apply averaged Itô formula, we have
Using this fact and Equation (7), one can estimates
for all fixed
, because of the appearance of the function
. Thus
for
and
, that is,
.
Then it proves the regularity and the global existence of the solution
and by means of Lemma 2.1 under the condition of (A), we also derive the uniqueness and continuity of the solution.
Similarly the above discussions, we only need to take the function
as
, and we can also obtain the same results under the condition of (B). Here, we omits the details.
This completes the proof of Theorem 3.1. ,
Remark 3.1. Because
are undefined in the domain
. In what follows, we distinguish three cases to investigate the solution of these special situations.
1) If
, then the system (5) will reduce to
(8)
with intial condition
. By using the similar analysis, we know that the above SDE is regular which implies there exists a unique global solution on
;
2) If
, then the system (5) will reduce to an ODE
(9)
with intial condition
. By using the theory of ODE, we know that the above ODE is regular which implies there exists a unique global solution on
;
3) If
, then the system (5) will become
(10)
with intial condition
. By using the similar analysis, we know that the above SDE is regular which implies there exists a unique global solution on
.
4. Global Stochastic Asymptotic Stability of Disease Free Equilibrium
Theorem 4.1. Assume that
for all fixed
, then the disease free equilibrium solution
of Equation (5) is globally stochastically stable on
.
Proof. Notice that the assumption
for all
fixed
, and hence one can estimates that there exists a positive constant
which satisfies
for all fixed
. Introduce a Lyapunov function
Just note that the infinitesimal generator
satisfies
(11)
then
becomes negative definite on
, and hence it completes the proof of Theorem 4.1 by applying Lemma 2.2. ,
Remark 4.1. As we known, the basic reproduction number
is one of the most important parameters in epidemiology, which reflects the expected number of secondary infections produced when one infected individual entered a fully susceptible population. If
then the outbreak will disappear, on the other hand, if
then the epidemic will spread a population. In this context, the
basic reproduction number of the SIR model is
.
5. Stochastic Asymptotic Stability of Endemic Equilibrium
If
and
, then there exists a unique endemic equilibrium solution
for the model (5), where
Theorem 5.1. The endemic equilibrium solution,
of the Equation (5) is stochastically asymptotically stable on
under the assumption of
for some
such that
and satisfies
, where
(12)
and
(13)
(14)
Proof. It is a fact that the endemic equilibrium solution of system (5) exists if
and
. Introduce a Lyapunov function
on
, where
and
are defined as Equations ((13) and (14)), c is an arbitrary positive constant. An elementary computation leads to
for any point
, and we have
From the following formulas and the definitions of
,
can help to simplify
i)
ii)
iii)
iv)
Then
if and only if
and by the given condition one can obtain
on
. Therefore
is negative definite on
for some suitable
. Then Lemma 2.2 (ii) leads to the stochastically asymptotical stability of the endemic equilibrium with
and for some suitable functions
such that
satisfies Equation (12) and
. ,
6. Example
In this section, we visualize our results with some simulation to confirm them. Due to the difficulty of the research on the drawing of the disease equilibrium point, many scholars have not given the relevant examples. Along this clue, we only give the figures of the disease-free equilibrium point (Figure 1). We consider the special case
which only satisfies the condition of
Theorem 4.1
, that is,
, and
hence we can obtain the disease free equilibrium solution
of Equation (5) is globally stochastically stable on
. In the simulation, the parameters are chosen as follows
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the anonymous referees for very useful suggestions. The research has been supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China
![]()
Figure 1. The disease free equilibrium
is globally stochastically asymptotically stable since
for
,
,
,
and
.
(11361004). Xian-Hua Xie is supported by the Bidding Project of Gannan Normal University (16zb01). all of the authors are supported by the Key Laboratory of Jiangxi Province for Numerical Simulation and Emulation Techniques.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare that the study was realized in collaboration with the same responsibility.
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests regarding the publication of this paper.
Authors Contributions
All of the authors, XHX, LM and JFX contributed substantially to this paper, participated in drafting and checking the manuscript, and have approved the version to be published.