CPM Seminar

Network structure in aging: spherical-cow people

Andrew Rutenberg

Dalhousie University

As people age, we accumulate damage. This damage is stochastic, and leads to variation in individual health and lifespan. We can characterize damage with the Frailty Index (FI), which is the proportion of accumulated health deficits. We model a population of aging individuals with a stochastic network model, where interacting nodes represent their health attributes. Our model recovers Gompertz' law of mortality, the observed increase in FI with age, and an empirical limit to the observed FI. With stochastic simulation, mutual information, mean-field theory, and network physics, our model allows us to explore how deficit accumulation occurs and why the FI works to predict health and mortality.