Network optimization strategies for the process of synchronization have generally focused on the re-wiring or re-weighting of links in order to: (1) expand the range of coupling strengths that achieve synchronization, (2) expand the basin of attracti
on for the synchronization manifold, or (3) lower the average time to synchronization. A new optimization goal is proposed in seeking the minimum subset of the edge set of the original network that enables the same essential ability to synchronize. We call this type of minimal spanning subgraph an Essential Synchronization Backbone (ESB) of the original system, and we present two algorithms for computing this subgraph. One is by an exhaustive search and the other is a method of approximation for this combinatorial problem. The solution spaces that result from different choices of dynamical systems and coupling vary with the level of hierarchical structure present and also the number of interwoven central cycles. These may provide insight into synchronization as a process of sharing and transferring information. Applications can include the important problem in civil engineering of power grid hardening, where new link creation may be costly, but instead, the defense of certain key links to the functional process may be prioritized.
An accurate forecast of the red tide respiratory irritation level would improve the lives of many people living in areas affected by algal blooms. Using a decades-long database of daily beach conditions, two conceptually different models to forecast
the respiratory irritation risk level one day ahead of time are trained. One model is wind-based, using the current days respiratory level and the predicted wind direction of the following day. The other model is a probabilistic self-exciting Hawkes process model. Both models are trained on eight beaches in Florida during 2011-2017 and applied to the large red tide bloom during 2018-2019. The Hawkes process model performs best, correctly predicting the respiratory risk level an average of 86.7% of the time across all beaches, and at one beach, it is accurate more than 91% of the time.
The presence of hierarchy in many real-world networks is not yet fully explained. Complex interaction networks are often coarse-grain models of vast modular networks, where tightly connected subgraphs are agglomerated into nodes for simplicity of rep
resentation and feasibility of analysis. The emergence of hierarchy in growing complex networks may stem from one particular property of these ignored subgraphs: their graph conductance. Being a quantification of the main bottleneck of flow on the subgraph, all such subgraphs will then have a specific structural limitation associated with this scalar value. This supports the consideration of heterogeneous degree restrictions on a randomly growing network for which a hidden variable model is proposed based on the basic textit{rich-get-richer} scheme. Such node degree restrictions are drawn from various probability distributions, and it is shown that restriction generally leads to increased measures of hierarchy, while altering the tail of the degree distribution. Thus, a general mechanism is provided whereby inherent limitations lead to hierarchical self-organization.
The ultimate goal of cognitive neuroscience is to understand the mechanistic neural processes underlying the functional organization of the brain. Key to this study is understanding structure of both the structural and functional connectivity between
anatomical regions. In this paper we follow previous work in developing a simple dynamical model of the brain by simulating its various regions as Kuramoto oscillators whose coupling structure is described by a complex network. However in our simulations rather than generating synthetic networks, we simulate our synthetic model but coupled by a real network of the anatomical brain regions which has been reconstructed from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. By using an information theoretic approach that defines direct information flow in terms of causation entropy (CSE), we show that we can more accurately recover the true structural network than either of the popular correlation or LASSO regression techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method when applied to data simulated on the realistic DTI network, as well as on randomly generated small-world and Erdos-Renyi (ER) networks.
In this work, we introduce a new methodology for inferring the interaction structure of discrete valued time series which are Poisson distributed. While most related methods are premised on continuous state stochastic processes, in fact, discrete and
counting event oriented stochastic process are natural and common, so called time-point processes (TPP). An important application that we focus on here is gene expression. Nonparameteric methods such as the popular k-nearest neighbors (KNN) are slow converging for discrete processes, and thus data hungry. Now, with the new multi-variate Poisson estimator developed here as the core computational engine, the causation entropy (CSE) principle, together with the associated greedy search algorithm optimal CSE (oCSE) allows us to efficiently infer the true network structure for this class of stochastic processes that were previously not practical. We illustrate the power of our method, first in benchmarking with synthetic datum, and then by inferring the genetic factors network from a breast cancer micro-RNA (miRNA) sequence count data set. We show the Poisson oCSE gives the best performance among the tested methods anfmatlabd discovers previously known interactions on the breast cancer data set.
The stability (or instability) of synchronization is important in a number of real world systems, including the power grid, the human brain and biological cells. For identical synchronization, the synchronizability of a network, which can be measured
by the range of coupling strength that admits stable synchronization, can be optimized for a given number of nodes and links. Depending on the geometric degeneracy of the Laplacian eigenvectors, optimal networks can be classified into different sensitivity levels, which we define as a networks sensitivity index. We introduce an efficient and explicit way to construct optimal networks of arbitrary size over a wide range of sensitivity and link densities. Using coupled chaotic oscillators, we study synchronization dynamics on optimal networks, showing that cospectral optimal networks can have drastically different speed of synchronization. Such difference in dynamical stability is found to be closely related to the different structural sensitivity of these networks: generally, networks with high sensitivity index are slower to synchronize, and, surprisingly, may not synchronize at all, despite being theoretically stable under linear stability analysis.
