1,514 research outputs found
Periodicity of mass extinctions without an extraterrestrial cause
We study a lattice model of a multi-species prey-predator system. Numerical
results show that for a small mutation rate the model develops irregular
long-period oscillatory behavior with sizeable changes in a number of species.
The periodicity of extinctions on Earth was suggested by Raup and Sepkoski but
so far is lacking a satisfactory explanation. Our model indicates that this is
a natural consequence of the ecosystem dynamics, not the result of any
extraterrestrial cause.Comment: 4 pages, accepted in Phys.Rev.
Network Topology of an Experimental Futures Exchange
Many systems of different nature exhibit scale free behaviors. Economic
systems with power law distribution in the wealth is one of the examples. To
better understand the working behind the complexity, we undertook an empirical
study measuring the interactions between market participants. A Web server was
setup to administer the exchange of futures contracts whose liquidation prices
were coupled to event outcomes. After free registration, participants started
trading to compete for the money prizes upon maturity of the futures contracts
at the end of the experiment. The evolving `cash' flow network was
reconstructed from the transactions between players. We show that the network
topology is hierarchical, disassortative and scale-free with a power law
exponent of 1.02+-0.09 in the degree distribution. The small-world property
emerged early in the experiment while the number of participants was still
small. We also show power law distributions of the net incomes and
inter-transaction time intervals. Big winners and losers are associated with
high degree, high betweenness centrality, low clustering coefficient and low
degree-correlation. We identify communities in the network as groups of the
like-minded. The distribution of the community sizes is shown to be power-law
distributed with an exponent of 1.19+-0.16.Comment: 6 pages, 12 figure
Robustness of a Network of Networks
Almost all network research has been focused on the properties of a single
network that does not interact and depends on other networks. In reality, many
real-world networks interact with other networks. Here we develop an analytical
framework for studying interacting networks and present an exact percolation
law for a network of interdependent networks. In particular, we find that
for Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi networks each of average degree , the giant
component, , is given by
where is the initial fraction of removed nodes. Our general result
coincides for with the known Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi second-order phase
transition for a single network. For any cascading failures occur
and the transition becomes a first-order percolation transition. The new law
for shows that percolation theory that is extensively studied in
physics and mathematics is a limiting case () of a more general general
and different percolation law for interdependent networks.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
Searching for network modules
When analyzing complex networks a key target is to uncover their modular
structure, which means searching for a family of modules, namely node subsets
spanning each a subnetwork more densely connected than the average. This work
proposes a novel type of objective function for graph clustering, in the form
of a multilinear polynomial whose coefficients are determined by network
topology. It may be thought of as a potential function, to be maximized, taking
its values on fuzzy clusterings or families of fuzzy subsets of nodes over
which every node distributes a unit membership. When suitably parametrized,
this potential is shown to attain its maximum when every node concentrates its
all unit membership on some module. The output thus is a partition, while the
original discrete optimization problem is turned into a continuous version
allowing to conceive alternative search strategies. The instance of the problem
being a pseudo-Boolean function assigning real-valued cluster scores to node
subsets, modularity maximization is employed to exemplify a so-called quadratic
form, in that the scores of singletons and pairs also fully determine the
scores of larger clusters, while the resulting multilinear polynomial potential
function has degree 2. After considering further quadratic instances, different
from modularity and obtained by interpreting network topology in alternative
manners, a greedy local-search strategy for the continuous framework is
analytically compared with an existing greedy agglomerative procedure for the
discrete case. Overlapping is finally discussed in terms of multiple runs, i.e.
several local searches with different initializations.Comment: 10 page
Transport of multiple users in complex networks
We study the transport properties of model networks such as scale-free and
Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi networks as well as a real network. We consider the
conductance between two arbitrarily chosen nodes where each link has the
same unit resistance. Our theoretical analysis for scale-free networks predicts
a broad range of values of , with a power-law tail distribution , where , and is the decay
exponent for the scale-free network degree distribution. We confirm our
predictions by large scale simulations. The power-law tail in leads to large values of , thereby significantly improving the
transport in scale-free networks, compared to Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi networks
where the tail of the conductivity distribution decays exponentially. We
develop a simple physical picture of the transport to account for the results.
We study another model for transport, the \emph{max-flow} model, where
conductance is defined as the number of link-independent paths between the two
nodes, and find that a similar picture holds. The effects of distance on the
value of conductance are considered for both models, and some differences
emerge. We then extend our study to the case of multiple sources, where the
transport is define between two \emph{groups} of nodes. We find a fundamental
difference between the two forms of flow when considering the quality of the
transport with respect to the number of sources, and find an optimal number of
sources, or users, for the max-flow case. A qualitative (and partially
quantitative) explanation is also given
Small-world properties of the Indian Railway network
Structural properties of the Indian Railway network is studied in the light
of recent investigations of the scaling properties of different complex
networks. Stations are considered as `nodes' and an arbitrary pair of stations
is said to be connected by a `link' when at least one train stops at both
stations. Rigorous analysis of the existing data shows that the Indian Railway
network displays small-world properties. We define and estimate several other
quantities associated with this network.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Phys. Rev.
Nature versus Nurture in Complex and Not-So-Complex Systems
Understanding the dynamical behavior of many-particle systems both in and out
of equilibrium is a central issue in both statistical mechanics and complex
systems theory. One question involves "nature versus nurture": given a system
with a random initial state evolving through a well-defined stochastic
dynamics, how much of the information contained in the state at future times
depends on the initial condition ("nature") and how much on the dynamical
realization ("nurture")? We discuss this question and present both old and new
results for low-dimensional Ising spin systems.Comment: 7 page
Assortativity Decreases the Robustness of Interdependent Networks
It was recently recognized that interdependencies among different networks
can play a crucial role in triggering cascading failures and hence system-wide
disasters. A recent model shows how pairs of interdependent networks can
exhibit an abrupt percolation transition as failures accumulate. We report on
the effects of topology on failure propagation for a model system consisting of
two interdependent networks. We find that the internal node correlations in
each of the two interdependent networks significantly changes the critical
density of failures that triggers the total disruption of the two-network
system. Specifically, we find that the assortativity (i.e. the likelihood of
nodes with similar degree to be connected) within a single network decreases
the robustness of the entire system. The results of this study on the influence
of assortativity may provide insights into ways of improving the robustness of
network architecture, and thus enhances the level of protection of critical
infrastructures
Optimal Traffic Networks
Inspired by studies on the airports' network and the physical Internet, we
propose a general model of weighted networks via an optimization principle. The
topology of the optimal network turns out to be a spanning tree that minimizes
a combination of topological and metric quantities. It is characterized by a
strongly heterogeneous traffic, non-trivial correlations between distance and
traffic and a broadly distributed centrality. A clear spatial hierarchical
organization, with local hubs distributing traffic in smaller regions, emerges
as a result of the optimization. Varying the parameters of the cost function,
different classes of trees are recovered, including in particular the minimum
spanning tree and the shortest path tree. These results suggest that a
variational approach represents an alternative and possibly very meaningful
path to the study of the structure of complex weighted networks.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, final revised versio
Binary data corruption due to a Brownian agent
We introduce a model of binary data corruption induced by a Brownian agent
(active random walker) on a d-dimensional lattice. A continuum formulation
allows the exact calculation of several quantities related to the density of
corrupted bits \rho; for example the mean of \rho, and the density-density
correlation function. Excellent agreement is found with the results from
numerical simulations. We also calculate the probability distribution of \rho
in d=1, which is found to be log-normal, indicating that the system is governed
by extreme fluctuations.Comment: 39 pages, 10 figures, RevTe
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