No Arabic abstract
We provide a short introduction to the field of topological data analysis and discuss its possible relevance for the study of complex systems. Topological data analysis provides a set of tools to characterise the shape of data, in terms of the presence of holes or cavities between the points. The methods, based on notion of simplicial complexes, generalise standard network tools by naturally allowing for many-body interactions and providing results robust under continuous deformations of the data. We present strengths and weaknesses of current methods, as well as a range of empirical studies relevant to the field of complex systems, before identifying future methodological challenges to help understand the emergence of collective phenomena.
We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities providing a step toward defining a classification of the different levels of organization (the ``universality classes). A rapid survey covers the Gaussian law, the power law and the stretched exponential distributions. The fascination for power laws is then explained, starting from the statistical physics approach to critical phenomena, out-of-equilibrium phase transitions, self-organized criticality, and ending with a large but not exhaustive list of mechanisms leading to power law distributions. A check-list for testing and qualifying a power law distribution from your data is described in 7 steps. This essay enlarges the description of distributions by proposing that ``kings, i.e., events even beyond the extrapolation of the power law tail, may reveal an information which is complementary and perhaps sometimes even more important than the power law distribution. We conclude a list of future directions.
The problem of reconstructing nonlinear and complex dynamical systems from measured data or time series is central to many scientific disciplines including physical, biological, computer, and social sciences, as well as engineering and economics. In this paper, we review the recent advances in this forefront and rapidly evolving field, aiming to cover topics such as compressive sensing (a novel optimization paradigm for sparse-signal reconstruction), noised-induced dynamical mapping, perturbations, reverse engineering, synchronization, inner composition alignment, global silencing, Granger Causality and alternative optimization algorithms. Often, these rely on various concepts from statistical and nonlinear physics such as phase transitions, bifurcation, stabilities, and robustness. The methodologies have the potential to significantly improve our ability to understand a variety of complex dynamical systems ranging from gene regulatory systems to social networks towards the ultimate goal of controlling such systems. Despite recent progress, many challenges remain. A purpose of this Review is then to point out the specific difficulties as they arise from different contexts, so as to stimulate further efforts in this interdisciplinary field.
Simplicial complexes are a versatile and convenient paradigm on which to build all the tools and techniques of the logic of knowledge, on the assumption that initial epistemic models can be described in a distributed fashion. Thus, we can define: knowledge, belief, bisimulation, the group notions of mutual, distributed and common knowledge, and also dynamics in the shape of simplicial action models. We give a survey on how to interpret all such notions on simplicial complexes, building upon the foundations laid in prior work by Goubault and others.
While the study of graphs has been very popular, simplicial complexes are relatively new in the network science community. Despite being are a source of rich information, graphs are limited to pairwise interactions. However, several real world networks such as social networks, neuronal networks etc. involve simultaneous interactions between more than two nodes. Simplicial complexes provide a powerful mathematical way to model such interactions. Now, the spectrum of the graph Laplacian is known to be indicative of community structure, with nonzero eigenvectors encoding the identity of communities. Here, we propose that the spectrum of the Hodge Laplacian, a higher-order Laplacian applied to simplicial complexes, encodes simplicial communities. We formulate an algorithm to extract simplicial communities (of arbitrary dimension). We apply this algorithm on simplicial complex benchmarks and on real data including social networks and language-networks, where higher-order relationships are intrinsic. Additionally, datasets for simplicial complexes are scarce. Hence, we introduce a method of optimally generating a simplicial complex from its network backbone through estimating the textit{true} higher-order relationships when its community structure is known. We do so by using the adjusted mutual information to identify the configuration that best matches the expected data partition. Lastly, we demonstrate an example of persistent simplicial communities inspired by the field of persistence homology.
In the spirit of topological entropy we introduce new complexity functions for general dynamical systems (namely groups and semigroups acting on closed manifolds) but with an emphasis on the dynamics induced on simplicial complexes. For expansive systems remarkable properties are observed. Known examples are revisited and new examples are presented.