Tuesday, May 22, 2012

1205.4282 (Cesar H. Comin et al.)

The relationship between structure and function in complex networks
observed locally
   [PDF]

Cesar H. Comin, João B. Bunoro, Matheus P. Viana, Luciano da F. Costa
The study of complex networks has drawn much attention over the last years, mainly by virtue of its potential to characterize the most diverse systems through unified mathematical and computational tools. Not long ago the emphasis on this field mostly focused on the effects of the structural properties on the global behavior of a dynamical process taking place in the system. Recently, some studies started to unveil the richness of interactions that occur between groups of nodes when we look at the small scale of interactions occurring in the network. Such findings call for a new systematic methodology to quantify, at node level, how a dynamics is being influenced (or differentiated) by the structure of the underlying system. Here we present a first step towards this direction, in which we define a new measurement that, based on dynamical characteristics obtained for a large set of initial conditions, compares the dynamical behavior of the nodes present in the system. Through this measurement we find the high capacity of networks, generated by the geographic and Barab\'asi-Albert models, to exhibit groups of nodes with distinct dynamics compared to the rest of the network. We also present a practical application of the methodology by using the neuronal network of the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans}, where we show that the interneurons of the ventral cord presents a very large dynamical differentiation when compared to the rest of the network.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4282

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