Complete and phase synchronization in a heterogeneous small-world neuronal network

Synchronous firing of neurons is thought to be important for information communication in neuronal networks. This paper investigates the complete and phase synchronization in a heterogeneous small-world chaotic Hindmarsh--Rose neuronal network. The effects of various network parameters on synchronization behaviour are discussed with some biological explanations. Complete synchronization of small-world neuronal networks is studied theoretically by the master stability function method. It is shown that the coupling strength necessary for complete or phase synchronization decreases with the neuron number, the node degree and the connection density are increased. The effect of heterogeneity of neuronal networks is also considered and it is found that the network heterogeneity has an adverse effect on synchrony.     

Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on heterogeneous Newman-Watts small-world network

We focus on the heterogeneity of social networks and its role to the emergence of prevailing cooperators and sustainable cooperation. The social networks are representative of the interaction relationships between players and their encounters in each round of games. We study an evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma game on a variant of Newman-Watts small-world network, whose heterogeneity can be tuned by a parameter. It is found that optimal cooperation level exists at some intermediate topological heterogeneity for different temptations to defect. That is, frequency of cooperators peaks at a certain specific value of degree heterogeneity — neither the most heterogeneous case nor the most homogeneous one would favor the cooperators. Besides, the average degree of networks and the adopted update rule also affect the cooperation level.     

Dynamics-driven evolution to structural heterogeneity in complex networks

The mutual influence of dynamics and structure is a central issue in complex systems. In this paper we study by simulation slow evolution of network under the feedback of a local-majority-rule opinion process. If performance-enhancing local mutations have higher chances of getting integrated into its structure, the system can evolve into a highly heterogeneous small-world with a global hub (whose connectivity is proportional to the network size), strong local connection correlations and power-law-like degree distribution. Networks with better dynamical performance are achieved if structural evolution occurs much slower than the network dynamics. Structural heterogeneity of many biological and social dynamical systems may also be driven by various dynamics-structure coupling mechanisms.     

Cascading failure in Watts-Strogatz small-world networks

In this paper, we study the cascading failure in Watts-Strogatz small-world networks. We find that this network model has a heterogeneous betweenness distribution, although its degree distribution is homogeneous. Further study shows that this small-world network is robust to random attack but fragile to intentional attack, in the cascading failure scenario. With comparison to standard random graph and scale-free networks, our result indicates that the robust yet fragile property in the cascading failure scenario is mainly related to heterogeneous betweenness, rather than the network degree distribution. Thus, it suggests that we have to be very careful when we use terms such as homogeneous network and heterogeneous network, unless the distribution we refer to is specified.     

基于K-阶结构熵的网络异构性研究

结构熵可以考察复杂网络的异构性.为了弥补传统结构熵在综合刻画网络全局以及局部特性能力上的不足,本文依据网络节点在K步内可达的节点总数定义了K-阶结构熵,可从结构熵随K值的变化规律、最大K值下的结构熵以及网络能够达到的最小结构熵三个方面来评价网络的异构性.利用K-阶结构熵对规则网络、随机网络、Watts-Strogatz小世界网络、Barabási_-Albert无标度网络以及星型网络进行了理论研究与仿真实验,结果表明上述网络的异构性依次增强.其中K-阶结构熵能够较好地依据小世界属性来刻画小世界网络的异构性,且对星型网络异构性随其规模演化规律的解释也更为合理.此外, K-阶结构熵认为在规则结构外新增孤立节点的网络的异构性弱于未添加孤立节点的规则结构,但强于同节点数的规则网络.本文利用美国西部电网进一步论证了K-阶结构熵的有效性.     

Influence des brandons sur la propagation d'un feu de forêt

A two-dimensional weighed-site small-world network is proposed to study the action of firebrands (lofted flaming or glowing debris) on fire spread through homogeneous or heterogeneous systems. The firebrand emission distance obeys an exponentially-decreasing distribution law. For homogeneous systems, the effect of firebrands is strengthened when the fire impact length decreases and the characteristic firebrand emission distance increases. As a result, jumps in the rate of spread appear and time oscillations in the burning area can occur. For heterogeneous systems, this effect becomes weaker as the degree of disorder and the distance of firebrand emission increase. The influence of characteristic lengths of radiation, firebrand emission, and medium heterogeneity on fire spread is discussed. To cite this article: B. Porterie et al., C. R. Physique 6 (2005).     

Network topology of a potential energy landscape: a static scale-free network

Here we analyze the topology of the network formed by the minima and transition states on the potential energy landscape of small clusters. We find that this network has both a small-world and scale-free character. In contrast to other scale-free networks, where the topology results from the dynamics of the network growth, the potential energy landscape is a static entity. Therefore, a fundamentally different organizing principle underlies this behavior: The potential energy landscape is highly heterogeneous with the low-energy minima having large basins of attraction and acting as the highly connected hubs in the network.     

Modeling the world-wide airport network

Recently, we have presented the first exhaustive analysis of the world-wide airport network. Two important results of that study are that: (i) the world-wide airport network is a small-world network with power-law decaying degree and betweenness centrality distributions; (ii) the most connected cities (largest degree) are typically not the most central cities (largest betweenness centrality). This second finding is particularly significant because of results demonstrating that nodes with high betweenness tend to play a more important role in keeping networks connected than those with high degree. Here, we investigate if current network models can explain this finding and we show that they cannot. Thus, we propose a new model that explains this behavior in terms of the geo-political constraints that affect the growth of the airport network. We further hypothesize that in other infrastructures, affected by similar geo-political constraints, critical locations might not coincide with highly-connected hubs.Received: 14 January 2004, Published online: 14 May 2004PACS: 89.75.Fb Structures and organization in complex systems - 89.75.Da Systems obeying scaling laws - 89.40.Dd Air transporation     

Scale-free distribution of avian influenza outbreaks

Using global case data for the period from 25 November 2003 to 10 March 2007, we construct a network of plausible transmission pathways for the spread of avian influenza among domestic and wild birds. The network structure we obtain is complex and exhibits scale-free (although not necessarily small-world) properties. Communities within this network are connected with a distribution of links with infinite variance. Hence, the disease transmission model does not exhibit a threshold and so the infection will continue to propagate even with very low transmissibility. Consequentially, eradication with methods applicable to locally homogeneous populations is not possible. Any control measure needs to focus explicitly on the hubs within this network structure.     

Influence of topology in the evolution of coordination in complex networks under information diffusion constraints

In this paper, we study the influence of the topological structure of social systems on the evolution of coordination in them. We simulate a coordination game (“Stag-hunt”) on four well-known classes of complex networks commonly used to model social systems, namely scale-free, small-world, random and hierarchical-modular, as well as on the well-mixed model. Our particular focus is on understanding the impact of information diffusion on coordination, and how this impact varies according to the topology of the social system. We demonstrate that while time-lags and noise in the information about relative payoffs affect the emergence of coordination in all social systems, some topologies are markedly more resilient than others to these effects. We also show that, while non-coordination may be a better strategy in a society where people do not have information about the payoffs of others, coordination will quickly emerge as the better strategy when people get this information about others, even with noise and time lags. Societies with the so-called small-world structure are most conducive to the emergence of coordination, despite limitations in information propagation, while societies with scale-free topologies are most sensitive to noise and time-lags in information diffusion. Surprisingly, in all topologies, it is not the highest connected people (hubs), but the slightly less connected people (provincial hubs) who first adopt coordination. Our findings confirm that the evolution of coordination in social systems depends heavily on the underlying social network structure.     

一种基于最大流的网络结构熵

熵是可用来反映网络结构异质性的指标.针对传统熵指标不能很好反映网络全局异构性的不足,本文引入网络流的概念,综合考虑径向测度和中间测度,提出一种新的网络结构熵.特殊网络(如公用数据集Dolphins网络)的分析结果表明,本文提出的熵指标在一定程度上克服了其他网络熵指标的不足,更能够反映网络的真实拓扑结构;对随机网络、最近邻耦合网络、星型网络、无标度网络、Benchmark网络和小世界网络等典型网络的理论分析和仿真实验,进一步证明本文提出的熵指标在刻画一般复杂网络结构特征上的有效性和适用性.     

An effective method to improve the robustness of small-world networks under attack

In this study, the robustness of small-world networks to three types of attack is investigated. Global efficiency is introduced as the network coefficient to measure the robustness of a small-world network. The simulation results prove that an increase in rewiring probability or average degree can enhance the robustness of the small-world network under all three types of attack. The effectiveness of simultaneously increasing both rewiring probability and average degree is also studied, and the combined increase is found to significantly improve the robustness of the small-world network.Furthermore, the combined effect of rewiring probability and average degree on network robustness is shown to be several times greater than that of rewiring probability or average degree individually. This means that small-world networks with a relatively high rewiring probability and average degree have advantages both in network communications and in good robustness to attacks. Therefore, simultaneously increasing rewiring probability and average degree is an effective method of constructing realistic networks. Consequently, the proposed method is useful to construct efficient and robust networks in a realistic scenario.     

The interplay of synchronization and fluctuations reveals connectivity levels in networks of nonlinear oscillators

We study spatiotemporal patterns produced by small-world networks of biologically motivated nonlinear oscillators from a data-analysis perspective. It is shown that the connectivity levels of such systems can be reconstructed by analyzing heterogeneity and fluctuation content of the patterns. These properties are determined by applying spatiotemporal filters described in [Physica A 289 (2001) 498] to pairs of oscillators in a network. Possible applications of our method to biological data (e.g., time-resolved cDNA microarray data), in order to distinguish densely connected systems from sparsely connected systems, are commented on.     

Effects of Some Topological Ingredients on the Evolutionary Ultimatum Game

This study aims at figuring out the crucial topological ingredients which affect the outcomes of the ultimatum game located on different networks, encompassing the regular network, the random network, the small-world network, and the scale-free network. With the aid of random interchanging algorithm, we investigate the relations between the outcomes of the ultimatum game and some topological ingredients, including the average range, the clustering coefficient and the heterogeneity, and so forth. It is found that for the regular, random and small-work networks, the average range and the clustering coefficient have evident impacts on the ultimatum game, while for the scale-free network, the original degree heterogeneity and the underlying rich-club characterizations are the mainly important topological ingredients that influence the outcomes of ultimatum game substantially.     

An evolving network model with modular growth

In this paper, we propose an evolving network model growing fast in units of module, according to the analysis of the evolution characteristics in real complex networks. Each module is a small-world network containing several interconnected nodes and the nodes between the modules are linked by preferential attachment on degree of nodes. We study the modularity measure of the proposed model, which can be adjusted by changing the ratio of the number of inner-module edges and the number of inter-module edges. In view of the mean-field theory, we develop an analytical function of the degree distribution, which is verified by a numerical example and indicates that the degree distribution shows characteristics of the small-world network and the scale-free network distinctly at different segments. The clustering coefficient and the average path length of the network are simulated numerically, indicating that the network shows the small-world property and is affected little by the randomness of the new module.     

Memory-based evolutionary game on small-world network with tunable heterogeneity

Most papers about evolutionary games on graph assume agents have no memory. Yet, in the real world, interaction history can also affect an agent’s decision. So we introduce a memory-based agent model and investigate the Prisoner’s Dilemma game on a Heterogeneous Newman-Watts small-world network based on a Genetic Algorithm, focusing on heterogeneity’s role in the emergence of cooperative behaviors. In contrast with previous results, we find that a different heterogeneity parameter domain range imposes an entirely different impact on the cooperation fraction. In the parameter range corresponding to networks with extremely high heterogeneity, the decrease in heterogeneity greatly promotes the proportion of cooperation strategy, while in the remaining parameter range, which relates to relatively homogeneous networks, the variation of heterogeneity barely affects the cooperation fraction. Also our study provides a detailed insight into the microscopic factors that contribute to the performance of cooperation frequency.     

The Influence of Human Heterogeneity to Information Spreading

Humans are an integral part of the wide world and material areas, and morphological difference is widespread. In this paper, we propose a model to emphasize the influence of human heterogeneity to information spreading on social networks, and the properties including memory effects, social reinforcement, non-redundancy and human heterogeneity are taken into account. Simulation results indicate that the small-world networks generate the most effective spreading for the stronger human heterogeneity; however, for the weaker human heterogeneity, the regular networks will be more effective. In addition, for a given BA scale-free network, the stronger human heterogeneity will be more conducive to information spreading.     

Bifurcation in neuronal networks with hub structure

We investigate bifurcations in neuronal networks with a hub structure. It is known that hubs play a leading role in characterizing the network dynamical behavior. However, the dynamics of hubs or star-coupled systems is not well understood. Here, we study rather subnetworks with a star-like configuration. This coupled system is an important motif in complex networks. Thus, our study is a basic step for understanding structure formation in large networks. We use the Morris-Lecar neuron with class I and class II excitabilities as a node. Homogeneous (coupling the same class neurons) and heterogeneous (coupling different class neurons) cases are considered for both excitatory and inhibitory coupling. For the homogeneous system class II neurons are suitable for achieving both complete and cluster synchronization in excitatory and inhibitory coupling, respectively. For the heterogeneous system with inhibitory coupling, the class I hub neuron has a wider parameter region of synchronous firings than the class II hub. Moreover, the class I hub neuron with the excitatory synapse gives rise to bifurcations of synchronized states and multi-stability (coexistence of a few different states) is observed.     

异质自适应网络中的核心-边缘结构及其对疾病传播的抑制作用

节点属性异质自适应网络中疾病传播的研究表明节点属性异质性可以很大程度上增大传播阈值, 并且自组织形成一个更鲁棒的度异质网络结构. 本文从数值模拟方面研究鲁棒的度分布异质结构的自组织形成过程, 分析发现核心-边缘结构的形成才是导致传播阈值增大的根本原因. 鉴于此, 提出一种重连策略, 能够促进核心-边缘结构的形成, 从而达到增大传播阈值的目的. 这不仅有助于深入认识节点属性异质自适应网络中的流行病传播过程, 而且为疾病传播控制策略的提出提供了新思路.     

Opinion dynamics in networks with heterogeneous confidence and influence

We propose a discrete-time model of opinion dynamics. The neighborhood relationship is decided by confidence radius and influence radius of each agent. We investigate the influence of heterogeneity in confidence/influence distribution on the behavior of the network. The simulations suggest that the heterogeneity of single confidence or influence networks can promote the opinions to achieve consensus. It is shown that the heterogeneous influence radius systems converge in fewer time steps and more often in finite time than the heterogeneous confidence radius systems. We find that heterogeneity does not always promote consensus, and there is an optimal heterogeneity so that the relative size of the largest consensus cluster reaches maximum in heterogeneous confidence and influence networks.