526 research outputs found
Complex networks in climate dynamics - Comparing linear and nonlinear network construction methods
Complex network theory provides a powerful framework to statistically
investigate the topology of local and non-local statistical interrelationships,
i.e. teleconnections, in the climate system. Climate networks constructed from
the same global climatological data set using the linear Pearson correlation
coefficient or the nonlinear mutual information as a measure of dynamical
similarity between regions, are compared systematically on local, mesoscopic
and global topological scales. A high degree of similarity is observed on the
local and mesoscopic topological scales for surface air temperature fields
taken from AOGCM and reanalysis data sets. We find larger differences on the
global scale, particularly in the betweenness centrality field. The global
scale view on climate networks obtained using mutual information offers
promising new perspectives for detecting network structures based on nonlinear
physical processes in the climate system.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure
Statistical Physics of Hard Optimization Problems
Optimization is fundamental in many areas of science, from computer science
and information theory to engineering and statistical physics, as well as to
biology or social sciences. It typically involves a large number of variables
and a cost function depending on these variables. Optimization problems in the
NP-complete class are particularly difficult, it is believed that the number of
operations required to minimize the cost function is in the most difficult
cases exponential in the system size. However, even in an NP-complete problem
the practically arising instances might, in fact, be easy to solve. The
principal question we address in this thesis is: How to recognize if an
NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem is typically hard and what are the
main reasons for this? We adopt approaches from the statistical physics of
disordered systems, in particular the cavity method developed originally to
describe glassy systems. We describe new properties of the space of solutions
in two of the most studied constraint satisfaction problems - random
satisfiability and random graph coloring. We suggest a relation between the
existence of the so-called frozen variables and the algorithmic hardness of a
problem. Based on these insights, we introduce a new class of problems which we
named "locked" constraint satisfaction, where the statistical description is
easily solvable, but from the algorithmic point of view they are even more
challenging than the canonical satisfiability.Comment: PhD thesi
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