No Arabic abstract
From physics to engineering, biology and social science, natural and artificial systems are characterized by interconnected topologies whose features - e.g., heterogeneous connectivity, mesoscale organization, hierarchy - affect their robustness to external perturbations, such as targeted attacks to their units. Identifying the minimal set of units to attack to disintegrate a complex network, i.e. network dismantling, is a computationally challenging (NP-hard) problem which is usually attacked with heuristics. Here, we show that a machine trained to dismantle relatively small systems is able to identify higher-order topological patterns, allowing to disintegrate large-scale social, infrastructural and technological networks more efficiently than human-based heuristics. Remarkably, the machine assesses the probability that next attacks will disintegrate the system, providing a quantitative method to quantify systemic risk and detect early-warning signals of systems collapse. This demonstrates that machine-assisted analysis can be effectively used for policy and decision making to better quantify the fragility of complex systems and their response to shocks.
In this review, we present the different measures of early warning signals that can indicate the occurrence of critical transitions in complex systems. We start with the mechanisms that trigger critical transitions, how they relate to warning signals and the methods used to detect early warning signals (EWS) for sudden transitions or tipping. We discuss briefly a few applications in real systems in this context, like transitions in ecology, climate and environment, medicine, epidemics, finance and engineering. Towards the end, we mention the issues in detecting EWS in specific applications and our perspective on future trends in this area, especially related to sudden transitions in the dynamics of connected systems on complex networks.
COVID-19 pandemic has created an extreme pressure on the global healthcare services. Fast, reliable and early clinical assessment of the severity of the disease can help in allocating and prioritizing resources to reduce mortality. In order to study the important blood biomarkers for predicting disease mortality, a retrospective study was conducted on 375 COVID-19 positive patients admitted to Tongji Hospital (China) from January 10 to February 18, 2020. Demographic and clinical characteristics, and patient outcomes were investigated using machine learning tools to identify key biomarkers to predict the mortality of individual patient. A nomogram was developed for predicting the mortality risk among COVID-19 patients. Lactate dehydrogenase, neutrophils (%), lymphocyte (%), high sensitive C-reactive protein, and age - acquired at hospital admission were identified as key predictors of death by multi-tree XGBoost model. The area under curve (AUC) of the nomogram for the derivation and validation cohort were 0.961 and 0.991, respectively. An integrated score (LNLCA) was calculated with the corresponding death probability. COVID-19 patients were divided into three subgroups: low-, moderate- and high-risk groups using LNLCA cut-off values of 10.4 and 12.65 with the death probability less than 5%, 5% to 50%, and above 50%, respectively. The prognostic model, nomogram and LNLCA score can help in early detection of high mortality risk of COVID-19 patients, which will help doctors to improve the management of patient stratification.
The objective of this paper is to examine population response to COVID-19 and associated policy interventions through detecting early-warning signals in time series of visits to points of interest (POIs). Complex systems, such as cities, demonstrate early-warning signals when they approach phase transitions responding to external perturbation, including crises, policy changes, and human behavior changes. In urban systems, population visits to POIs represent a state in the complex systems that are cities. These states may undergo phase transitions due to population response to pandemic risks and intervention policies. In this study, we conducted early-warning signal detection on population visits to POIs to examine population response to pandemic risks. We examined two early-warning signals, the increase of autocorrelation at-lag-1 and standard deviation, in time series of population visits to POIs in 17 metropolitan cities in the United States of America. The results show that: (1) early-warning signals for population response to COVID-19 were detected between February 14 and March 11, 2020 in 17 cities; (2) detected population response had started prior to shelter-in-place orders in 17 cities; (3) early-warning signals detected from the essential POIs visits appeared earlier than those from non-essential POIs; and 4) longer time lags between detected population response and shelter-in-place orders led to a less decrease in POI visits. The results show the importance of detecting early-warning signals during crises in cities as complex systems. Early-warning signals could provide important insights regarding the timing and extent of population response to crises to inform policy makers.
We study the network dismantling problem, which consists in determining a minimal set of vertices whose removal leaves the network broken into connected components of sub-extensive size. For a large class of random graphs, this problem is tightly connected to the decycling problem (the removal of vertices leaving the graph acyclic). Exploiting this connection and recent works on epidemic spreading we present precise predictions for the minimal size of a dismantling set in a large random graph with a prescribed (light-tailed) degree distribution. Building on the statistical mechanics perspective we propose a three-stage Min-Sum algorithm for efficiently dismantling networks, including heavy-tailed ones for which the dismantling and decycling problems are not equivalent. We also provide further insights into the dismantling problem concluding that it is an intrinsically collective problem and that optimal dismantling sets cannot be viewed as a collection of individually well performing nodes.
Human mobility has a significant impact on several layers of society, from infrastructural planning and economics to the spread of diseases and crime. Representing the system as a complex network, in which nodes are assigned to regions (e.g., a city) and links indicate the flow of people between two of them, physics-inspired models have been proposed to quantify the number of people migrating from one city to the other. Despite the advances made by these models, our ability to predict the number of commuters and reconstruct mobility networks remains limited. Here, we propose an alternative approach using machine learning and 22 urban indicators to predict the flow of people and reconstruct the intercity commuters network. Our results reveal that predictions based on machine learning algorithms and urban indicators can reconstruct the commuters network with 90.4% of accuracy and describe 77.6% of the variance observed in the flow of people between cities. We also identify essential features to recover the network structure and the urban indicators mostly related to commuting patterns. As previously reported, distance plays a significant role in commuting, but other indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and unemployment rate, are also driven-forces for people to commute. We believe that our results shed new lights on the modeling of migration and reinforce the role of urban indicators on commuting patterns. Also, because link-prediction and network reconstruction are still open challenges in network science, our results have implications in other areas, like economics, social sciences, and biology, where node attributes can give us information about the existence of links connecting entities in the network.