“Macroprediction of critical transitions in adaptive networks”

Tuan Pham, PhD at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, will present the work of Leonhard Horstmeyer, Tuan Pham, Jan Korbel and Stefan Thurner at the yearly meeting of the Complex Systems Society, which this year takes place in Thessaloniki, Greece, from September 23–28.

Vellidio Convention Center, Room 5

Title: “Macroprediction of Critical Transitions in Adaptive Networks”

Track: “Socio-Ecological Systems”

Abstract:

The collapse of ecosystems, the extinction of species or the breakdown of company networks, banking networks and political systems usually hinges on topological properties of the underlying interaction network, such as the existence of keystone nodes.

Knowing just the macroscopic non-structural information, such as species abundances, company revenues etc, it seems impossible to make predictions about impending collapses of these systems. We show, however, that such macroscopic predictions are possible in adaptive networks with catalytic interactions. The appearance of the most vulnerable autocatalytic structure, a single catalytic cycle, can be sensed macroscopically by a phenomenon that we dub quantization. This allows us to accurately estimate the expected time until collapse.