1,953 research outputs found
The effects of heterogeneity on stochastic cycles in epidemics
Models of biological processes are often subject to different sources of
noise. Developing an understanding of the combined effects of different types
of uncertainty is an open challenge. In this paper, we study a variant of the
susceptible-infective-recovered model of epidemic spread, which combines both
agent-to-agent heterogeneity and intrinsic noise. We focus on epidemic cycles,
driven by the stochasticity of infection and recovery events, and study in
detail how heterogeneity in susceptibilities and propensities to pass on the
disease affects these quasi-cycles. While the system can only be described by a
large hierarchical set of equations in the transient regime, we derive a
reduced closed set of equations for population-level quantities in the
stationary regime. We analytically obtain the spectra of quasi-cycles in the
linear-noise approximation. We find that the characteristic frequency of these
cycles is typically determined by population averages of susceptibilities and
infectivities, but that their amplitude depends on higher-order moments of the
heterogeneity. We also investigate the synchronisation properties and phase lag
between different groups of susceptible and infected individuals.Comment: Main text 16 pages, 9 figures. Supplement 5 page
An “approximate knowledge”: event transmission in the post-9/11 informational culture
The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret it as a singularity, that is a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices
Aspiration Dynamics of Multi-player Games in Finite Populations
Studying strategy update rules in the framework of evolutionary game theory,
one can differentiate between imitation processes and aspiration-driven
dynamics. In the former case, individuals imitate the strategy of a more
successful peer. In the latter case, individuals adjust their strategies based
on a comparison of their payoffs from the evolutionary game to a value they
aspire, called the level of aspiration. Unlike imitation processes of pairwise
comparison, aspiration-driven updates do not require additional information
about the strategic environment and can thus be interpreted as being more
spontaneous. Recent work has mainly focused on understanding how aspiration
dynamics alter the evolutionary outcome in structured populations. However, the
baseline case for understanding strategy selection is the well-mixed population
case, which is still lacking sufficient understanding. We explore how
aspiration-driven strategy-update dynamics under imperfect rationality
influence the average abundance of a strategy in multi-player evolutionary
games with two strategies. We analytically derive a condition under which a
strategy is more abundant than the other in the weak selection limiting case.
This approach has a long standing history in evolutionary game and is mostly
applied for its mathematical approachability. Hence, we also explore strong
selection numerically, which shows that our weak selection condition is a
robust predictor of the average abundance of a strategy. The condition turns
out to differ from that of a wide class of imitation dynamics, as long as the
game is not dyadic. Therefore a strategy favored under imitation dynamics can
be disfavored under aspiration dynamics. This does not require any population
structure thus highlights the intrinsic difference between imitation and
aspiration dynamics
Evolutionary games on graphs
Game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines
from biology to behavioral sciences to economics. In its evolutionary form and
especially when the interacting agents are linked in a specific social network
the underlying solution concepts and methods are very similar to those applied
in non-equilibrium statistical physics. This review gives a tutorial-type
overview of the field for physicists. The first three sections introduce the
necessary background in classical and evolutionary game theory from the basic
definitions to the most important results. The fourth section surveys the
topological complications implied by non-mean-field-type social network
structures in general. The last three sections discuss in detail the dynamic
behavior of three prominent classes of models: the Prisoner's Dilemma, the
Rock-Scissors-Paper game, and Competing Associations. The major theme of the
review is in what sense and how the graph structure of interactions can modify
and enrich the picture of long term behavioral patterns emerging in
evolutionary games.Comment: Review, final version, 133 pages, 65 figure
Data based identification and prediction of nonlinear and complex dynamical systems
We thank Dr. R. Yang (formerly at ASU), Dr. R.-Q. Su (formerly at ASU), and Mr. Zhesi Shen for their contributions to a number of original papers on which this Review is partly based. This work was supported by ARO under Grant No. W911NF-14-1-0504. W.-X. Wang was also supported by NSFC under Grants No. 61573064 and No. 61074116, as well as by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beijing Nova Programme.Peer reviewedPostprin
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