Title
Detection Of Timescales In Evolving Complex Systems
Abstract
Most complex systems are intrinsically dynamic in nature. The evolution of a dynamic complex system is typically represented as a sequence of snapshots, where each snapshot describes the configuration of the system at a particular instant of time. This is often done by using constant intervals but a better approach would be to define dynamic intervals that match the evolution of the system's configuration. To this end, we propose a method that aims at detecting evolutionary changes in the configuration of a complex system, and generates intervals accordingly. We show that evolutionary timescales can be identified by looking for peaks in the similarity between the sets of events on consecutive time intervals of data. Tests on simple toy models reveal that the technique is able to detect evolutionary timescales of time-varying data both when the evolution is smooth as well as when it changes sharply. This is further corroborated by analyses of several real datasets. Our method is scalable to extremely large datasets and is computationally efficient. This allows a quick, parameter-free detection of multiple timescales in the evolution of a complex system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1038/srep39713
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Field
DocType
Volume
Complex system,Computer science,System configuration,Algorithm,Real-time computing,Snapshot (computer storage),Scalability
Journal
6
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2045-2322
3
0.41
References 
Authors
7
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Richard K. Darst1242.26
Clara Granell21036.99
A Arenas362338.38
Sergio Gómez437724.96
Jari Saramäki559437.21
Santo Fortunato6251.70