From brain to earth and climate systems: Small-world interaction networks or not?

Abstract

We consider recent reports on small-world topologies of interaction networks derived from the dynamics of spatially extended systems that are investigated in diverse scientific fields such as neurosciences, geophysics, or meteorology. With numerical simulations that mimic typical experimental situations we have identified an important constraint when characterizing such networks: indications of a small-world topology can be expected solely due to the spatial sampling of the system along with commonly used time series analysis based approaches to network characterization.

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Cited by in corpus (32)

• Robust Detection of Dynamic Community Structure in Networks
• Investigating the topology of interacting networks - Theory and application to coupled climate subnetworks
• Evolving networks in the human epileptic brain
• Analytical framework for recurrence-network analysis of time series
• FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillators on complex networks mimic epileptic-seizure-related synchronization phenomena
• Inferring long memory processes in the climate network via ordinal pattern analysis
• Disentangling different types of El Niño episodes by evolving climate network analysis
• Node-weighted measures for complex networks with spatially embedded, sampled, or differently sized nodes
• Quantifying information transfer and mediation along causal pathways in complex systems
• How important is the seizure onset zone for seizure dynamics?
• Beware of the Small-World neuroscientist!
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