No Arabic abstract
Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general mechanisms that explain the creation and endurance of such hierarchies are not well understood. We introduce a generative model for the dynamics of hierarchies using time-varying networks in which new links are formed based on the preferences of nodes in the current network and old links are forgotten over time. The model produces a range of hierarchical structures, ranging from egalitarianism to bistable hierarchies, and we derive critical points that separate these regimes in the limit of long system memory. Importantly, our model supports statistical inference, allowing for a principled comparison of generative mechanisms using data. We apply the model to study hierarchical structures in empirical data on hiring patterns among mathematicians, dominance relations among parakeets, and friendships among members of a fraternity, observing several persistent patterns as well as interpretable differences in the generative mechanisms favored by each. Our work contributes to the growing literature on statistically grounded models of time-varying networks.
The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transportation networks. The current work investigates the spatial properties of congestion, that is, we aim to characterize the city areas where traffic bottlenecks occur. The analysis of a large amount of real road networks in previous works showed that congestion points experience spatial abrupt transitions, namely they shift away from the city center as larger urban areas are incorporated. The fundamental ingredient behind this effect is the entanglement of central and arterial roads, embedded in separated geographical regions. In this paper we extend the analysis of the conditions yielding abrupt transitions of congestion location. First, we look into the more realistic situation in which arterial and central roads, rather than lying on sharply separated regions, present spatial overlap. It results that this affects the position of bottlenecks and introduces new possible congestion areas. Secondly, we pay particular attention to the role played by the edge distribution, proving that it allows to smooth the transitions profile, and so to control the congestion displacement. Finally, we show that the aforementioned phenomenology may be recovered also as a consequence of a discontinuity in the nodes density, in a domain with uniform connectivity. Our results provide useful insights for the design and optimization of urban road networks, and the management of the daily traffic.
Social fragmentation caused by widening differences among constituents has recently become a highly relevant issue to our modern society. Theoretical models of social fragmentation using the adaptive network framework have been proposed and studied in earlier literature, which are known to either converge to a homogeneous, well-connected network or fragment into many disconnected sub-networks with distinct states. Here we introduced the diversities of behavioral attributes among social constituents and studied their effects on social network evolution. We investigated, using a networked agent-based simulation model, how the resulting network states and topologies would be affected when individual constituents cultural tolerance, cultural state change rate, and edge weight change rate were systematically diversified. The results showed that the diversity of cultural tolerance had the most direct effect to keep the cultural diversity within the society high and simultaneously reduce the average shortest path length of the social network, which was not previously reported in the earlier literature. Diversities of other behavioral attributes also had effects on final states of the social network, with some nonlinear interactions. Our results suggest that having a broad distribution of cultural tolerance levels within society can help promote the coexistence of cultural diversity and structural connectivity.
We propose and illustrate an approach to coarse-graining the dynamics of evolving networks (networks whose connectivity changes dynamically). The approach is based on the equation-free framework: short bursts of detailed network evolution simulations are coupled with lifting and restriction operators that translate between actual network realizations and their (appropriately chosen) coarse observables. This framework is used here to accelerate temporal simulations (through coarse projective integration), and to implement coarsegrained fixed point algorithms (through matrix-free Newton-Krylov GMRES). The approach is illustrated through a simple network evolution example, for which analytical approximations to the coarse-grained dynamics can be independently obtained, so as to validate the computational results. The scope and applicability of the approach, as well as the issue of selection of good coarse observables are discussed.
The dynamical origin of complex networks, i.e., the underlying principles governing network evolution, is a crucial issue in network study. In this paper, by carrying out analysis to the temporal data of Flickr and Epinions--two typical social media networks, we found that the dynamical pattern in neighborhood, especially the formation of triadic links, plays a dominant role in the evolution of networks. We thus proposed a coevolving dynamical model for such networks, in which the evolution is only driven by the local dynamics--the preferential triadic closure. Numerical experiments verified that the model can reproduce global properties which are qualitatively consistent with the empirical observations.
We address the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab. We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topic and provide a differential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each platform and their users. We fit information spreading with epidemic models characterizing the basic reproduction numbers $R_0$ for each social media platform. Moreover, we characterize information spreading from questionable sources, finding different volumes of misinformation in each platform. However, information from both reliable and questionable sources do not present different spreading patterns. Finally, we provide platform-dependent numerical estimates of rumors amplification.