Imagine a virus spreads between individuals when they are in the same room. Then, consider the hypergraph where each hyperedge is the set of individuals who happened to be together in a same room. It may represent the **network on which the virus spreads** (although adding time information seems needed).

More generally, since hypergraphs are equivalent to bipartite graphs, they model many real-world situations.

Another example is the **co-authoring hypergraph**, in which each paper leads to an hyperedge between its authors. It is used to study the structure of scientific fields.

In recommender systems, one also considers **hypergraphs over products**, where hyperedges are sets of products bought by a same client.

The [wikipedia hypergraph page][1] has some pointers to various applications.

I hope this helps, good luck with your course!


  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph#Applications