Diffusion on networked systems is a question of time or structure

Jean-Charles Delvenne (), Renaud Lambiotte and Luis Rocha
Additional contact information
Jean-Charles Delvenne: ICTEAM and CORE, University of Louvain
Renaud Lambiotte: University of Namur

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Network science investigates the architecture of complex systems to understand their functional and dynamical properties. Structural patterns such as communities shape diffusive processes on networks. However, these results hold under the strong assumption that networks are static entities where temporal aspects can be neglected. Here we propose a generalized formalism for linear dynamics on complex networks, able to incorporate statistical properties of the timings at which events occur. We show that the diffusion dynamics is affected by the network community structure and by the temporal properties of waiting times between events. We identify the main mechanism—network structure, burstiness or fat tails of waiting times—determining the relaxation times of stochastic processes on temporal networks, in the absence of temporal–structure correlations. We identify situations when fine-scale structure can be discarded from the description of the dynamics or, conversely, when a fully detailed model is required due to temporal heterogeneities.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8366 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Diffusion on networked systems is a question of time or structure (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms8366

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8366

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().