No Arabic abstract
Complex network theory aims to model and analyze complex systems that consist of multiple and interdependent components. Among all studies on complex networks, topological structure analysis is of the most fundamental importance, as it represents a natural route to understand the dynamics, as well as to synthesize or optimize the functions, of networks. A broad spectrum of network structural patterns have been respectively reported in the past decade, such as communities, multipartites, hubs, authorities, outliers, bow ties, and others. Here, we show that most individual real-world networks demonstrate multiplex structures. That is, a multitude of known or even unknown (hidden) patterns can simultaneously situate in the same network, and moreover they may be overlapped and nested with each other to collaboratively form a heterogeneous, nested or hierarchical organization, in which different connective phenomena can be observed at different granular levels. In addition, we show that the multiplex structures hidden in exploratory networks can be well defined as well as effectively recognized within an unified framework consisting of a set of proposed concepts, models, and algorithms. Our findings provide a strong evidence that most real-world complex systems are driven by a combination of heterogeneous mechanisms that may collaboratively shape their ubiquitous multiplex structures as we observe currently. This work also contributes a mathematical tool for analyzing different sources of networks from a new perspective of unveiling multiplex structures, which will be beneficial to multiple disciplines including sociology, economics and computer science.
Many real-world complex systems are best modeled by multiplex networks of interacting network layers. The multiplex network study is one of the newest and hottest themes in the statistical physics of complex networks. Pioneering studies have proven that the multiplexity has broad impact on the systems structure and function. In this Colloquium paper, we present an organized review of the growing body of current literature on multiplex networks by categorizing existing studies broadly according to the type of layer coupling in the problem. Major recent advances in the field are surveyed and some outstanding open challenges and future perspectives will be proposed.
Recent progress towards unraveling the hidden geometric organization of real multiplexes revealed significant correlations across the hyperbolic node coordinates in different network layers, which facilitated applications like trans-layer link prediction and mutual navigation. But are geometric correlations alone sufficient to explain the topological relation between the layers of real systems? Here we provide the negative answer to this question. We show that connections in real systems tend to persist from one layer to another irrespectively of their hyperbolic distances. This suggests that in addition to purely geometric aspects the explicit link formation process in one layer impacts the topology of other layers. Based on this finding, we present a simple modification to the recently developed Geometric Multiplex Model to account for this effect, and show that the extended model can reproduce the behavior observed in real systems. We also find that link persistence is significant in all considered multiplexes and can explain their layers high edge overlap, which cannot be explained by coordinate correlations alone. Furthermore, by taking both link persistence and hyperbolic distance correlations into account we can improve trans-layer link prediction. These findings guide the development of multiplex embedding methods, suggesting that such methods should be accounting for both coordinate correlations and link persistence across layers.
Graphs have been utilized as a powerful tool to model pairwise relationships between people or objects. Such structure is a special type of a broader concept referred to as hypergraph, in which each hyperedge may consist of an arbitrary number of nodes, rather than just two. A large number of real-world datasets are of this form - for example, list of recipients of emails sent from an organization, users participating in a discussion thread or subject labels tagged in an online question. However, due to complex representations and lack of adequate tools, little attention has been paid to exploring the underlying patterns in these interactions. In this work, we empirically study a number of real-world hypergraph datasets across various domains. In order to enable thorough investigations, we introduce the multi-level decomposition method, which represents each hypergraph by a set of pairwise graphs. Each pairwise graph, which we refer to as a k-level decomposed graph, captures the interactions between pairs of subsets of k nodes. We empirically find that at each decomposition level, the investigated hypergraphs obey five structural properties. These properties serve as criteria for evaluating how realistic a hypergraph is, and establish a foundation for the hypergraph generation problem. We also propose a hypergraph generator that is remarkably simple but capable of fulfilling these evaluation metrics, which are hardly achieved by other baseline generator models.
Many real-world networks are embedded into a space or spacetime. The embedding space(time) constrains the properties of these real-world networks. We use the scale-dependent spectral dimension as a tool to probe whether real-world networks encode information on the dimensionality of the embedding space. We find that spacetime networks which are inspired by quantum gravity and based on a hybrid signature, following the Minkowski metric at small spatial distance and the Euclidean metric at large spatial distance, provide a template relevant for real-world networks of small-world type, including a representation of the internets architecture and biological neural networks.
We present a study on the selection of a variety of activity patterns among neurons that are connected in multiplex framework, with neurons on two layers with different functional couplings. With Hindmarsh-Rose model for the dynamics of single neurons, we analyze the possible patterns of dynamics in each layer separately, and report emergent patterns of activity like anti-phase oscillations in multi-clusters with phase regularities and enhanced amplitude and frequency with mixed mode oscillations when the connections are inhibitory. When they are multiplexed with neurons of one layer coupled with excitatory synaptic coupling and neurons of the other layer coupled with inhibitory synaptic coupling, we observe transfer or selection of interesting patterns of collective behaviour between the layers, inducing anti-phase oscillations and multi-cluster oscillations. While the revival of oscillations occurs in the layer with excitatory coupling, the transition from anti-phase to in-phase and vice versa is observed in the other layer with inhibitory synaptic coupling. We also discuss how the selection of these patterns can be controlled by tuning the intra-layer or inter-layer coupling strengths or increasing the range of non-local coupling. With one layer having electrical coupling while the other synaptic coupling of excitatory(inhibitory)type, we find in-phase(anti-phase) synchronized patterns of activity among neurons in both layers.