arXiv subjects

V. Nicosia

Publications and source records attributed to V. Nicosia.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2017

Emergent explosive synchronization in adaptive complex networks

Adaptation plays a fundamental role in shaping the structure of a complex network and improving its functional fitting. Even when increasing the level of synchronization in a biological system is considered as the main driving force for adaptation, there is evidence of negative effects induced by excessive synchronization. This indicates that coherence alone can not be enough to explain all the structural features observed in many real-world networks. In this work, we propose an adaptive network model where the dynamical evolution of the node states towards synchronization is coupled with an evolution of the link weights based on an anti-Hebbian adaptive rule, which accounts for the presence of inhibitory effects in the system. We found that the emergent networks spontaneously develop the structural conditions to sustain explosive synchronization. Our results can enlighten the shaping mechanisms at the heart of the structural and dynamical organization of some relevant biological systems, namely brain networks, for which the emergence of explosive synchronization has been observed.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2014

Hybrid recommendation methods in complex networks

We propose here two new recommendation methods, based on the appropriate normalization of already existing similarity measures, and on the convex combination of the recommendation scores derived from similarity between users and between objects. We validate the proposed measures on three relevant data sets, and we compare their performance with several recommendation systems recently proposed in the literature. We show that the proposed similarity measures allow to attain an improvement of performances of up to 20\% with respect to existing non-parametric methods, and that the accuracy of a recommendation can vary widely from one specific bipartite network to another, which suggests that a careful choice of the most suitable method is highly relevant for an effective recommendation on a given system. Finally, we studied how an increasing presence of random links in the network affects the recommendation scores, and we found that one of the two recommendation algorithms introduced here can systematically outperform the others in noisy data sets.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2014

Layer aggregation and reducibility of multilayer interconnected networks

Many complex systems can be represented as networks composed by distinct layers, interacting and depending on each others. For example, in biology, a good description of the full protein-protein interactome requires, for some organisms, up to seven distinct network layers, with thousands of protein-protein interactions each. A fundamental open question is then how much information is really necessary to accurately represent the structure of a multilayer complex system, and if and when some of the layers can indeed be aggregated. Here we introduce a method, based on information theory, to reduce the number of layers in multilayer networks, while minimizing information loss. We validate our approach on a set of synthetic benchmarks, and prove its applicability to an extended data set of protein-genetic interactions, showing cases where a strong reduction is possible and cases where it is not. Using this method we can describe complex systems with an optimal trade--off between accuracy and complexity.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2013

Assessment of urban ecosystem resilience using the efficiency of hybrid social-physical complex networks

One of the most important tasks of urban and hazard planning is to mitigate the damages and minimize the costs of the recovery process after catastrophic events. The rapidity and the efficiency of the recovery process are commonly referred to as resilience. Despite the problem of resilience quantification has received a lot of attention, a mathematical definition of the resilience of an urban community, which takes into account the social aspects of a urban environment, has not yet been identified. In this paper we provide and test a methodology for the assessment of urban resilience to catastrophic events which aims at bridging the gap between the engineering and the ecosystem approaches to resilience. We propose to model a urban system by means of different hybrid social-physical complex networks, obtained by enriching the urban street network with additional information about the social and physical constituents of a city, namely citizens, residential buildings and services. Then, we introduce a class of efficiency measures on these hybrid networks, inspired by the definition of global efficiency given in complex network theory, and we show that these measures can be effectively used to quantify the resilience of a urban system, by comparing their respective values before and after a catastrophic event and during the reconstruction process. As a case study, we consider simulated earthquakes in the city of Acerra, Italy, and we use these efficiency measures to compare the ability of different reconstruction strategies in restoring the original performance of the urban system.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2012

Components in time-varying graphs

Real complex systems are inherently time-varying. Thanks to new communication systems and novel technologies, it is today possible to produce and analyze social and biological networks with detailed information on the time of occurrence and duration of each link. However, standard graph metrics introduced so far in complex network theory are mainly suited for static graphs, i.e., graphs in which the links do not change over time, or graphs built from time-varying systems by aggregating all the links as if they were concurrent in time. In this paper, we extend the notion of connectedness, and the definitions of node and graph components, to the case of time-varying graphs, which are represented as time-ordered sequences of graphs defined over a fixed set of nodes. We show that the problem of finding strongly connected components in a time-varying graph can be mapped into the problem of discovering the maximal-cliques in an opportunely constructed static graph, which we name the affine graph. It is therefore an NP-complete problem. As a practical example, we have performed a temporal component analysis of time-varying graphs constructed from three data sets of human interactions. The results show that taking time into account in the definition of graph components allows to capture important features of real systems. In particular, we observe a large variability in the size of node temporal in- and out-components. This is due to intrinsic fluctuations in the activity patterns of individuals, which cannot be detected by static graph analysis.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2011

Impact of network structure on a model of diffusion and competitive interaction

We consider a model in which agents of different species move over a complex network, are subject to reproduction and compete for resources. The complementary roles of competition and diffusion produce a variety of fixed points, whose stability depends on the structure of the underlying complex network. The survival and death of species is influenced by the network degree distribution, clustering, degree-degree correlations and community structures. We found that the invasion of all the nodes by just one species is possible only in Erdos-Renyi and regular graphs, while networks with scale--free degree distribution, as those observed in real social, biological and technological systems, guarantee the co-existence of different species and therefore help enhancing species diversity.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2011

Defecting or not defecting: how to "read" human behavior during cooperative games by EEG measurements

Understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for human social interactions is difficult, since the brain activities of two or more individuals have to be examined simultaneously and correlated with the observed social patterns. We introduce the concept of hyper-brain network, a connectivity pattern representing at once the information flow among the cortical regions of a single brain as well as the relations among the areas of two distinct brains. Graph analysis of hyper-brain networks constructed from the EEG scanning of 26 couples of individuals playing the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma reveals the possibility to predict non-cooperative interactions during the decision-making phase. The hyper-brain networks of two-defector couples have significantly less inter-brain links and overall higher modularity - i.e. the tendency to form two separate subgraphs - than couples playing cooperative or tit-for-tat strategies. The decision to defect can be "read" in advance by evaluating the changes of connectivity pattern in the hyper-brain network.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2009

Extending the definition of modularity to directed graphs with overlapping communities

Complex networks topologies present interesting and surprising properties, such as community structures, which can be exploited to optimize communication, to find new efficient and context-aware routing algorithms or simply to understand the dynamics and meaning of relationships among nodes. Complex networks are gaining more and more importance as a reference model and are a powerful interpretation tool for many different kinds of natural, biological and social networks, where directed relationships and contextual belonging of nodes to many different communities is a matter of fact. This paper starts from the definition of modularity function, given by M. Newman to evaluate the goodness of network community decompositions, and extends it to the more general case of directed graphs with overlapping community structures. Interesting properties of the proposed extension are discussed, a method for finding overlapping communities is proposed and results of its application to benchmark case-studies are reported. We also propose a new dataset which could be used as a reference benchmark for overlapping community structures identification.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2007

Efficient Searching and Retrieval of Documents in PROSA

Retrieving resources in a distributed environment is more difficult than finding data in centralised databases. In the last decade P2P system arise as new and effective distributed architectures for resource sharing, but searching in such environments could be difficult and time-consuming. In this paper we discuss efficiency of resource discovery in PROSA, a self-organising P2P system heavily inspired by social networks. All routing choices in PROSA are made locally, looking only at the relevance of the next peer to each query. We show that PROSA is able to effectively answer queries for rare documents, forwarding them through the most convenient path to nodes that much probably share matching resources. This result is heavily related to the small-world structure that naturally emerges in PROSA.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2007

Exploiting social networks dynamics for P2P resource organisation

In this paper we present a formal description of PROSA, a P2P resource management system heavily inspired by social networks. Social networks have been deeply studied in the last two decades in order to understand how communities of people arise and grow. It is a widely known result that networks of social relationships usually evolves to small-worlds, i.e. networks where nodes are strongly connected to neighbours and separated from all other nodes by a small amount of hops. This work shows that algorithms implemented into PROSA allow to obtain an efficient small-world P2P network.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2007

Social Behaviours Applied to P2P Systems: An efficient Algorithm for Resource Organisation

P2P systems are a great solution to the problem of distributing resources. The main issue of P2P networks is that searching and retrieving resources shared by peers is usually expensive and does not take into account similarities among peers. In this paper we present preliminary simulations of PROSA, a novel algorithm for P2P network structuring, inspired by social behaviours. Peers in PROSA self--organise in social groups of similar peers, called ``semantic--groups'', depending on the resources they are sharing. Such a network smoothly evolves to a small--world graph, where queries for resources are efficiently and effectively routed.

cs.DC↗