This paper describes an agent-based model of a finite group of agents in a single population who each choose which convention to advocate, and which convention to practice. Influences or dependencies in agents choice exists in the form of guru effects and what others practice. With payoffs being dependent on cumulative rewards or actual standings in society, we illustrate the evolutionary dynamics of the phase structure of each group in the population via simulations.
Network growth processes can be understood as generative models of the structure and history of complex networks. This point of view naturally leads to the problem of network archaeology: reconstructing all the past states of a network from its structure---a difficult permutation inference problem. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian formulation of network archaeology, with a generalization of preferential attachment as our generative mechanism. We develop a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to evaluate the posterior averages of this model, as well as an efficient heuristic that uncovers a history well correlated with the true one, in polynomial time. We use these methods to identify and characterize a phase transition in the quality of the reconstructed history, when they are applied to artificial networks generated by the model itself. Despite the existence of a no-recovery phase, we find that nontrivial inference is possible in a large portion of the parameter space as well as on empirical data.
We study the problem of identifying macroscopic structures in networks, characterizing the impact of introducing link directions on the detectability phase transition. To this end, building on the stochastic block model, we construct a class of hardly detectable directed networks. We find closed form solutions by using belief propagation method showing how the transition line depends on the assortativity and the asymmetry of the network. Finally, we numerically identify the existence of a hard phase for detection close to the transition point.
Public opinion is often affected by the presence of committed groups of individuals dedicated to competing points of view. Using a model of pairwise social influence, we study how the presence of such groups within social networks affects the outcome and the speed of evolution of the overall opinion on the network. Earlier work indicated that a single committed group within a dense social network can cause the entire network to quickly adopt the groups opinion (in times scaling logarithmically with the network size), so long as the committed group constitutes more than about 10% of the population (with the findings being qualitatively similar for sparse networks as well). Here we study the more general case of opinion evolution when two groups committed to distinct, competing opinions $A$ and $B$, and constituting fractions $p_A$ and $p_B$ of the total population respectively, are present in the network. We show for stylized social networks (including ErdH{o}s-Renyi random graphs and Barabasi-Albert scale-free networks) that the phase diagram of this system in parameter space $(p_A,p_B)$ consists of two regions, one where two stable steady-states coexist, and the remaining where only a single stable steady-state exists. These two regions are separated by two fold-bifurcation (spinodal) lines which meet tangentially and terminate at a cusp (critical point). We provide further insights to the phase diagram and to the nature of the underlying phase transitions by investigating the model on infinite (mean-field limit), finite complete graphs and finite sparse networks. For the latter case, we also derive the scaling exponent associated with the exponential growth of switching times as a function of the distance from the critical point.
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.
The dynamic evolution at zero temperature of a uniform Ising ferromagnet on a square lattice is followed by Monte Carlo computer simulations. The system always eventually reaches a final, absorbing state, which sometimes coincides with a ground state (all spins parallel), and sometimes does not (parallel stripes of spins up and down). We initiate here the numerical study of ``Chaotic Time Dependence (CTD) by seeing how much information about the final state is predictable from the randomly generated quenched initial state. CTD was originally proposed to explain how nonequilibrium spin glasses could manifest equilibrium pure state structure, but in simpler systems such as homogeneous ferromagnets it is closely related to long-term predictability and our results suggest that CTD might indeed occur in the infinite volume limit.