arXiv subjects

Patrick Desrosiers

Publications and source records attributed to Patrick Desrosiers.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Operator-theoretic approach to the partial integration of randomly coupled phase oscillators

In our previous work [arXiv:2504.06248], we adopted Koopman theory to link the existence of different constants of motion to the presence of specific network motifs of Kuramoto oscillators. Yet, it remains to be shown how the partial integration can be carried out using the Koopman generator and its eigenfunctions. In this paper, we construct a random graph from network motifs that admit Koopman eigenfunctions and conserved quantities, and use it to define a partially integrable Kuramoto model. We perform the partial integration of the introduced model when there are monomial eigenfunctions and conserved cross-ratios, while providing an operator-theoretic derivation of the Watanabe-Strogatz transformation based on Magnus expansion and a recent result on closed forms of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula [arXiv:1502.06589].

math.DS↗

arXiv2025

Kuramoto meets Koopman: Constants of motion, symmetries, and network motifs

Conserved quantities in phase-oscillator dynamics are well established for identically coupled oscillators, or groups thereof, but the explicit connectivity conditions under which more complex networks admit constants of motion remain difficult to identify. Using Koopman theory, we derive general conditions for the existence of distinct conserved quantities in the Kuramoto model with heterogeneous phase lags on any weighted, directed, and signed graph. To this end, we find Koopman eigenfunctions and continuous Lie symmetries that generate different families of constants of motion. The derived conditions reveal a broad class of network motifs that support conserved quantities and we detect these motifs in hundreds of complex empirical networks. The results thus point to connectivity patterns that can preserve phase relationships over time and motivate further investigations of Koopman spectral properties for dynamics on complex networks.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2024

On the reconstruction limits of complex networks

Network reconstruction consists in retrieving the hidden interaction structure of a system from observations. Many reconstruction algorithms have been proposed, although less research has been devoted to describe their theoretical limitations. In this work, we take a first-principles approach and build on our earlier definition of reconstructability-the fraction of structural information recoverable from data. We relate this quantity to the true data-generating (TDG) process and delineate an information-theoretic reconstruction limit, i.e., the upper bound of the mutual information between the true underlying graph and any graph reconstructed from observations. These concepts lead us to a principled numerical method to assess the validity of empirically reconstructed networks, based on model selection and a quantity we introduce: the reconstruction index. This index approximates the reconstructability from data, quantifies the variability of the reconstructed network ensemble, and is shown to predict reconstruction error without requiring knowledge of the true underlying network. We characterize this method and test it on empirical time series and networks.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

The low-rank hypothesis of complex systems

Complex systems are high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems with intricate interactions among their constituents. To make interpretable predictions about their large-scale behavior, it is typically assumed, without a clear statement, that these dynamics can be reduced to a few number of equations involving a low-rank matrix describing the network of interactions -- what we call the low-rank hypothesis. Our paper sheds light on this assumption and questions its validity. By leveraging fundamental theorems on singular value decomposition, we expose the hypothesis for various random graphs, either by making explicit their low-rank formulation or by demonstrating the exponential decrease of their singular values. Notably, we verify the hypothesis experimentally for real networks by revealing the rapid decrease of their singular values, which has major consequences on their effective ranks. We then evaluate the impact of the low-rank hypothesis for general dynamical systems on networks through an optimal dimension reduction. This allows us to prove that recurrent neural networks can be exactly reduced, and to connect the rapidly decreasing singular values of real networks to the dimension reduction error of the nonlinear dynamics they support, be it microbial, neuronal or epidemiological. Finally, we prove that higher-order interactions naturally emerge from the dimension reduction, thus providing theoretical insights into the origin of higher-order interactions in complex systems.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2023

The determining role of covariances in large networks of stochastic neurons

Biological neural networks are notoriously hard to model due to their stochastic behavior and high dimensionality. We tackle this problem by constructing a dynamical model of both the expectations and covariances of the fractions of active and refractory neurons in the network's populations. We do so by describing the evolution of the states of individual neurons with a continuous-time Markov chain, from which we formally derive a low-dimensional dynamical system. This is done by solving a moment closure problem in a way that is compatible with the nonlinearity and boundedness of the activation function. Our dynamical system captures the behavior of the high-dimensional stochastic model even in cases where the mean-field approximation fails to do so. Taking into account the second-order moments modifies the solutions that would be obtained with the mean-field approximation, and can lead to the appearance or disappearance of fixed points and limit cycles. We moreover perform numerical experiments where the mean-field approximation leads to periodically oscillating solutions, while the solutions of the second-order model can be interpreted as an average taken over many realizations of the stochastic model. Altogether, our results highlight the importance of including higher moments when studying stochastic networks and deepen our understanding of correlated neuronal activity.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2023

Firing rate distributions in plastic networks of spiking neurons

In recurrent networks of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons, mean-field theory has proven successful in describing various statistical properties of neuronal activity at equilibrium, such as firing rate distributions. Mean-field theory has been applied to networks in which either the synaptic weights are homogeneous across synapses and the number of incoming connections of individual neurons is heterogeneous, or vice versa. Here we extend the previous mean-field formalisms to treat networks in which these two sources of structural heterogeneity occur simultaneously, including networks whose synapses are subject to plastic, activity-dependent modulation. The plasticity in our model is mediated by the introduction of one spike trace per neuron: a chemical signal that is released every time the neuron emits a spike and which is degraded over time. The temporal evolution of the trace is controlled by its degradation rate $r_p$ and by the neuron's underlying firing rate $ν$. When the ratio $α=ν/ r_p$ tends to infinity, the trace can be rescaled to be a reliable estimation of the neuron's firing rate. In this regime, the value of any synaptic weight at equilibrium is a function of the pre- and post-synaptic firing rates, and this relation can be used in the mean-field formalism. The solution to the mean-field equations specifies the firing rate and synaptic weight distributions at equilibrium. These equations are exact in the limit of reliable traces but they already provide accurate results when the degradation rate lies within a reasonable range, as we show by comparison with simulations of the full neuronal dynamics in networks composed of excitatory and inhibitory LIF neurons. Overall, this work offers a way to explore and better understand the way in which plasticity shapes both activity and structure in neuronal networks.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2023

Dimension matters when modeling network communities in hyperbolic spaces

Over the last decade, random hyperbolic graphs have proved successful in providing geometric explanations for many key properties of real-world networks, including strong clustering, high navigability, and heterogeneous degree distributions. These properties are ubiquitous in systems as varied as the internet, transportation, brain or epidemic networks, which are thus unified under the hyperbolic network interpretation on a surface of constant negative curvature. Although a few studies have shown that hyperbolic models can generate community structures, another salient feature observed in real networks, we argue that the current models are overlooking the choice of the latent space dimensionality that is required to adequately represent clustered networked data. We show that there is an important qualitative difference between the lowest-dimensional model and its higher-dimensional counterparts with respect to how similarity between nodes restricts connection probabilities. Since more dimensions also increase the number of nearest neighbors for angular clusters representing communities, considering only one more dimension allows us to generate more realistic and diverse community structures.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Duality between predictability and reconstructability in complex systems

Predicting the evolution of a large system of units using its structure of interaction is a fundamental problem in complex system theory. And so is the problem of reconstructing the structure of interaction from temporal observations. Here, we find an intricate relationship between predictability and reconstructability using an information-theoretical point of view. We use the mutual information between a random graph and a stochastic process evolving on this random graph to quantify their codependence. Then, we show how the uncertainty coefficients, which are intimately related to that mutual information, quantify our ability to reconstruct a graph from an observed time series, and our ability to predict the evolution of a process from the structure of its interactions. Interestingly, we find that predictability and reconstructability, even though closely connected by the mutual information, can behave differently, even in a dual manner. We prove how such duality universally emerges when changing the number of steps in the process, and provide numerical evidence of other dualities occurring near the criticality of multiple different processes evolving on different types of structures.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2022

Dimension reduction of dynamics on modular and heterogeneous directed networks

Dimension reduction is a common strategy to study non-linear dynamical systems composed by a large number of variables. The goal is to find a smaller version of the system whose time evolution is easier to predict while preserving some of the key dynamical features of the original system. Finding such a reduced representation for complex systems is, however, a difficult task. We address this problem for dynamics on weighted directed networks, with special emphasis on modular and heterogeneous networks. We propose a two-step dimension-reduction method that takes into account the properties of the adjacency matrix. First, units are partitioned into groups of similar connectivity profiles. Each group is associated to an observable that is a weighted average of the nodes' activities within the group. Second, we derive a set of conditions that must be fulfilled for these observables to properly represent the original system's behavior, together with a method for approximately solving them. The result is a reduced adjacency matrix and an approximate system of ODEs for the observables' evolution. We show that the reduced system can be used to predict some characteristic features of the complete dynamics for different types of connectivity structures, both synthetic and derived from real data, including neuronal, ecological, and social networks. Our formalism opens a way to a systematic comparison of the effect of various structural properties on the overall network dynamics. It can thus help to identify the main structural driving forces guiding the evolution of dynamical processes on networks.

math.DS↗

arXiv2022

Beyond Wilson-Cowan dynamics: oscillations and chaos without inhibition

Fifty years ago, Wilson and Cowan developed a mathematical model to describe the activity of neural populations. In this seminal work, they divided the cells in three groups: active, sensitive and refractory, and obtained a dynamical system to describe the evolution of the average firing rates of the populations. In the present work, we investigate the impact of the often neglected refractory state and show that taking it into account can introduce new dynamics. Starting from a continuous-time Markov chain, we perform a rigorous derivation of a mean-field model that includes the refractory fractions of populations as dynamical variables. Then, we perform bifurcation analysis to explain the occurance of periodic solutions in cases where the classical Wilson-Cowan does not predict oscillations. We also show that our mean-field model is able to predict chaotic behavior in the dynamics of networks with as little as two populations.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2020

Threefold way to the dimension reduction of dynamics on networks: an application to synchronization

Several complex systems can be modeled as large networks in which the state of the nodes continuously evolves through interactions among neighboring nodes, forming a high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical system. One of the main challenges of Network Science consists in predicting the impact of network topology and dynamics on the evolution of the states and, especially, on the emergence of collective phenomena, such as synchronization. We address this problem by proposing a Dynamics Approximate Reduction Technique (DART) that maps high-dimensional (complete) dynamics unto low-dimensional (reduced) dynamics while preserving the most salient features, both topological and dynamical, of the original system. DART generalizes recent approaches for dimension reduction by allowing the treatment of complex-valued dynamical variables, heterogeneities in the intrinsic properties of the nodes as well as modular networks with strongly interacting communities. Most importantly, we identify three major reduction procedures whose relative accuracy depends on whether the evolution of the states is mainly determined by the intrinsic dynamics, the degree sequence, or the adjacency matrix. We use phase synchronization of oscillator networks as a benchmark for our threefold method. We successfully predict the synchronization curves for three phase dynamics (Winfree, Kuramoto, theta) on the stochastic block model. Moreover, we obtain the bifurcations of the Kuramoto-Sakaguchi model on the mean stochastic block model with asymmetric blocks and we show numerically the existence of periphery chimera state on the two-star graph. This allows us to highlight the critical role played by the asymmetry of community sizes on the existence of chimera states. Finally, we systematically recover well-known analytical results on explosive synchronization by using DART for the Kuramoto-Sakaguchi model on the star graph.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2019

Phase transition in the recoverability of network history

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.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Symmetric functions in superspace: a compendium of results and open problems (including a SageMath worksheet)

We present a review of the most important results in the theory of symmetric functions in superspace (or symmetric superpolynomials), summarizing all principal contributions since its introduction in 2001 in the context of the supersymmetric Calogero-Moser-Sutherland integrable model. We also mention some open problems which remain unanswered at this moment, in particular the connection with representation theory. In addition, we provide a free open access source code, relying on SageMath library, that can be used as a research tool for symmetric superpolynomials. The content is directed to an audience new to this research area, but who is familiar with the classical theory of symmetric functions.

math-ph↗

arXiv2019

Spectral dimension reduction of complex dynamical networks

Dynamical networks are powerful tools for modeling a broad range of complex systems, including financial markets, brains, and ecosystems. They encode how the basic elements (nodes) of these systems interact altogether (via links) and evolve (nodes' dynamics). Despite substantial progress, little is known about why some subtle changes in the network structure, at the so-called critical points, can provoke drastic shifts in its dynamics. We tackle this challenging problem by introducing a method that reduces any network to a simplified low-dimensional version. It can then be used to describe the collective dynamics of the original system. This dimension reduction method relies on spectral graph theory and, more specifically, on the dominant eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the network adjacency matrix. Contrary to previous approaches, our method is able to predict the multiple activation of modular networks as well as the critical points of random networks with arbitrary degree distributions. Our results are of both fundamental and practical interest, as they offer a novel framework to relate the structure of networks to their dynamics and to study the resilience of complex systems.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Universality of the stochastic block model

Mesoscopic pattern extraction (MPE) is the problem of finding a partition of the nodes of a complex network that maximizes some objective function. Many well-known network inference problems fall in this category, including, for instance, community detection, core-periphery identification, and imperfect graph coloring. In this paper, we show that the most popular algorithms designed to solve MPE problems can in fact be understood as special cases of the maximum likelihood formulation of the stochastic block model (SBM), or one of its direct generalizations. These equivalence relations show that the SBM is nearly universal with respect to MPE problems.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2017

Finite size analysis of the detectability limit of the stochastic block model

It has been shown in recent years that the stochastic block model (SBM) is sometimes undetectable in the sparse limit, i.e., that no algorithm can identify a partition correlated with the partition used to generate an instance, if the instance is sparse enough and infinitely large. In this contribution, we treat the finite case explicitly, using arguments drawn from information theory and statistics. We give a necessary condition for finite-size detectability in the general SBM. We then distinguish the concept of average detectability from the concept of instance-by-instance detectability and give explicit formulas for both definitions. Using these formulas, we prove that there exist large equivalence classes of parameters, where widely different network ensembles are equally detectable with respect to our definitions of detectability. In an extensive case study, we investigate the finite-size detectability of a simplified variant of the SBM, which encompasses a number of important models as special cases. These models include the symmetric SBM, the planted coloring model, and more exotic SBMs not previously studied. We conclude with three appendices, where we study the interplay of noise and detectability, establish a connection between our information-theoretic approach and random matrix theory, and provide proofs of some of the more technical results.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

The supersymmetric Ruijsenaars-Schneider model

An integrable supersymmetric generalization of the trigonometric Ruijsenaars-Schneider model is presented whose symmetry algebra includes the super Poincaré algebra. Moreover, its Hamiltonian is showed to be diagonalized by the recently introduced Macdonald superpolynomials. Somewhat surprisingly, the consistency of the scalar product forces the discreteness of the Hilbert space.

hep-th↗

arXiv2014

Scaling limits of correlations of characteristic polynomials for the Gaussian beta-ensemble with external source

We study the averaged product of characteristic polynomials of large random matrices in the Gaussian beta-ensemble perturbed by an external source of finite rank. We prove that at the edge of the spectrum, the limiting correlations involve two families of multivariate functions of Airy and Gaussian types. The precise form of the limiting correlations depends on the strength of the nonzero eigenvalues of the external source. A critical value for the latter is obtained and a phase transition phenomenon similar to that of arXiv:math/0403022 is established. The derivation of our results relies mainly on previous articles by the authors, which deal with duality formulas arXiv:0801.3438 and asymptotics for Selberg-type integrals arXiv:1112.1119v3.

math-ph↗