The Evolution of Complex Networks: A New Framework

Co-evolution exhibited by a network system, involving the intricate interplay between the dynamics of the network itself and the subsystems connected by it, is a key concept for understanding the self-organized, flexible nature of real-world network systems. We propose a simple model of such co-evolving network dynamics, in which the diffusion of a resource over a weighted network and the resource-driven evolution of the link weights occur simultaneously. We demonstrate that,...

Many complex systems, including networks, are not static but can display strong fluctuations at various time scales. Characterizing the dynamics in complex networks is thus of the utmost importance in the understanding of these networks and of the dynamical processes taking place on them. In this article, we study the example of the US airport network in the time period 1990-2000. We show that even if the statistical distributions of most indicators are stationary, an intense...

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic processes, called evolving network Markov chains, in evolving networks. Our approach is to transform the degree distribution problem of an evolving network to a corresponding problem of evolving network Markov chains. We investigate the evolving network Markov chains, thereby obtaining some exact formulas as well as a precise criterion for determining whether the steady degree distribution of the evolving network is a power-law or...

Innovation is the driving force of human progress. Recent urn models reproduce well the dynamics through which the discovery of a novelty may trigger further ones, in an expanding space of opportunities, but neglect the effects of social interactions. Here we focus on the mechanisms of collective exploration and we propose a model in which many urns, representing different explorers, are coupled through the links of a social network and exploit opportunities coming from their...

For most technical networks, the interplay of dynamics, traffic and topology is assumed crucial to their evolution. In this paper, we propose a traffic-driven evolution model of weighted technological networks. By introducing a general strength-coupling mechanism under which the traffic and topology mutually interact, the model gives power-law distributions of degree, weight and strength, as confirmed in many real networks. Particularly, depending on a parameter W that contro...

Recently several authors have proposed stochastic models of the growth of the Web graph that give rise to power-law distributions. These models are based on the notion of preferential attachment leading to the ``rich get richer'' phenomenon. However, these models fail to explain several distributions arising from empirical results, due to the fact that the predicted exponent is not consistent with the data. To address this problem, we extend the evolutionary model of the Web ...

Many social, technological and biological interactions involve network relationships whose outcome intimately depends on the structure of the network and on the strengths of the connections. Yet, although much information is now available concerning the structure of many networks, the strengths are more difficult to measure. Here we show that, for one particular social network, notably the e-mail network, a suitable measure of the strength of the connections can be available....

Motivated by the idea that some characteristics are specific to the relations between individuals and not of the individuals themselves, we study a prototype model for the dynamics of the states of the links in a fixed network of interacting units. Each link in the network can be in one of two equivalent states. A majority link-dynamics rule is implemented, so that in each dynamical step the state of a randomly chosen link is updated to the state of the majority of neighborin...

We discuss a newly proposed model by Barrat et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 228701, 2004) for weighted evolving networks and suggest yet another model which can be viewed in the framework of worldwide airport network as "busy airports get busier".

Inspired by scientific collaboration networks, especially our empirical analysis of the network of econophysicists, an evolutionary model for weighted networks is proposed. Both degree-driven and weight-driven models are considered. Compared with the BA model and other evolving models with preferential attachment, there are two significant generalizations. First, besides the new vertex added in at every time step, old vertices can also attempt to build up new links, or to rec...