No Arabic abstract
Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms, money invested in mutual funds, the GDP of individual countries and the scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar growth fluctuations. The fluctuations display characteristic features, including double exponential scaling in the body of the distribution and power law scaling of the standard deviation as a function of size. To explain this we propose a remarkably simple additive replication model: At each step each individual is replaced by a new number of individuals drawn from the same replication distribution. If the replication distribution is sufficiently heavy tailed then the growth fluctuations are Levy distributed. We analyze the data from bird populations, firms, and mutual funds and show that our predictions match the data well, in several respects: Our theory results in a much better collapse of the individual distributions onto a single curve and also correctly predicts the scaling of the standard deviation with size. To illustrate how this can emerge from a collective microscopic dynamics we propose a model based on stochastic influence dynamics over a scale-free contact network and show that it produces results similar to those observed. We also extend the model to deal with correlations between individual elements. Our main conclusion is that the universality of growth fluctuations is driven by the additivity of growth processes and the action of the generalized central limit theorem.
Universal spectral properties of multiplex networks allow us to assess the nature of the transition between disease-free and endemic phases in the SIS epidemic spreading model. In a multiplex network, depending on a coupling parameter, $p$, the inverse participation ratio ($IPR$) of the leading eigenvector of the adjacency matrix can be in two different structural regimes: (i) layer-localized and (ii) delocalized. Here we formalize the structural transition point, $p^*$, between these two regimes, showing that there are universal properties regarding both the layer size $n$ and the layer configurations. Namely, we show that $IPR sim n^{-delta}$, with $deltaapprox 1$, and revealed an approximately linear relationship between $p^*$ and the difference between the layers average degrees. Furthermore, we showed that this multiplex structural transition is intrinsically connected with the nature of the SIS phase transition, allowing us to both understand and quantify the phenomenon. As these results are related to the universal properties of the leading eigenvector, we expect that our findings might be relevant to other dynamical processes in complex networks.
We investigate the formation of opinion against authority in an authoritarian society composed of agents with different levels of authority. We explore a dissenting opinion, held by lower-ranking, obedient, or less authoritative people, spreading in an environment of an affirmative opinion held by authoritative leaders. A real-world example would be a corrupt society where people revolt against such leaders, but it can be applied to more general situations. In our model, agents can change their opinion depending on their authority relative to their neighbors and their own confidence level. In addition, with a certain probability, agents can override the affirmative opinion to take the dissenting opinion of a neighbor. Based on analytic derivation and numerical simulations, we observe that both the network structure and heterogeneity in authority, and their correlation, significantly affect the possibility of the dissenting opinion to spread through the population. In particular, the dissenting opinion is suppressed when the authority distribution is very heterogeneous and there exists a positive correlation between the authority and the number of neighbors of people (degree). Except for such an extreme case, though, spreading of the dissenting opinion takes place when people have the tendency to override the authority to hold the dissenting opinion, but the dissenting opinion can take a long time to spread to the entire society, depending on the model parameters. We argue that the internal social structure of agents sets the scale of the time to reach consensus, based on the analysis of the underlying structural properties of opinion spreading.
We show using scaling arguments and Monte Carlo simulations that a class of binary interacting models of opinion evolution belong to the Ising universality class in presence of an annealed noise term of finite amplitude. While the zero noise limit is known to show an active-absorbing transition, addition of annealed noise induces a continuous order-disorder transition with Ising universality class in the infinite-range (mean field) limit of the models.
An important issue in the study of cities is defining a metropolitan area, as different definitions affect the statistical distribution of urban activity. A commonly employed method of defining a metropolitan area is the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), based on rules attempting to capture the notion of city as a functional economic region, and is constructed using experience. The MSA is time-consuming and is typically constructed only for a subset (few hundreds) of the most highly populated cities. Here, we introduce a new method to designate metropolitan areas, denoted the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA). The CCA is based on spatial distributions of the population at a fine geographic scale, defining a city beyond the scope of its administrative boundaries. We use the CCA to examine Gibrats law of proportional growth, postulating that the mean and standard deviation of the growth rate of cities are constant, independent of city size. We find that the mean growth rate of a cluster utilizing the CCA exhibits deviations from Gibrats law, and that the standard deviation decreases as a power-law with respect to the city size. The CCA allows for the study of the underlying process leading to these deviations, shown to arise from the existence of long-range spatial correlations in the population growth. These results have socio-political implications, such as those pertaining to the location of new economic development in cities of varied size.
Adaptation plays a fundamental role in shaping the structure of a complex network and improving its functional fitting. Even when increasing the level of synchronization in a biological system is considered as the main driving force for adaptation, there is evidence of negative effects induced by excessive synchronization. This indicates that coherence alone can not be enough to explain all the structural features observed in many real-world networks. In this work, we propose an adaptive network model where the dynamical evolution of the node states towards synchronization is coupled with an evolution of the link weights based on an anti-Hebbian adaptive rule, which accounts for the presence of inhibitory effects in the system. We found that the emergent networks spontaneously develop the structural conditions to sustain explosive synchronization. Our results can enlighten the shaping mechanisms at the heart of the structural and dynamical organization of some relevant biological systems, namely brain networks, for which the emergence of explosive synchronization has been observed.