Percolation threshold of a network is the critical value such that when nodes or edges are randomly selected with probability below the value, the network is fragmented but when the probability is above the value, a giant component connecting a large portion of the network would emerge. Assessing the percolation threshold of networks has wide applications in network reliability, information spread, epidemic control, etc. The theoretical approach so far to assess the percolation threshold is mainly based on spectral radius of adjacency matrix or non-backtracking matrix, which is limited to dense graphs or locally treelike graphs, and is less effective for sparse networks with non-negligible amount of triangles and loops. In this paper, we study high-order non-backtracking matrices and their application to assessing percolation threshold. We first define high-order non-backtracking matrices and study the properties of their spectral radii. Then we focus on the 2nd-order non-backtracking matrix and demonstrate analytically that the reciprocal of its spectral radius gives a tighter lower bound than those of adjacency and standard non-backtracking matrices. We further build a smaller size matrix with the same largest eigenvalue as the 2nd-order non-backtracking matrix to improve computation efficiency. Finally, we use both synthetic networks and 42 real networks to illustrate that the use of the 2nd-order non-backtracking matrix does give better lower bound for assessing percolation threshold than adjacency and standard non-backtracking matrices.
Since a lot of realistic networks are sparse, Karrer . @cite_5 and Hamilton . @cite_20 simultaneously propose that the reciprocal of the largest eigenvalue of the non-backtracking matrix is a tighter lower bound for bond and site percolation threshold, respectively, on sparse networks. This prediction is based on a message passing technique and obtained by heuristic equations and approximations on locally treelike structures. Radicchi @cite_19 further presents a mapping between the site and bond percolation to mathematically verify the predicted bond and site percolation thresholds are identical in this method. Although the estimation based on the non-backtracking matrix is more precise than that based on the adjacency matrix, it is still not close enough to the true percolation threshold on many real networks @cite_30 , since it suffers from the limitation of the treelike assumption. Radicchi . @cite_16 also derives an alternative matrix of the non-backtracking matrix based on triangle elimination to improve the estimate for the site percolation threshold. However, this alternative matrix would overshoot on bond percolation. That means this estimate may overestimate the percolation threshold, leading it no longer provides a lower bound for the bond percolation threshold.
@cite_30 @cite_19 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_20
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We consider different methods, that do not rely on numerical simulations of the percolation process, to approximate percolation thresholds in networks. We perform a systematic analysis on synthetic graphs and a collection of 109 real networks to quantify their effectiveness and reliability as prediction tools. Our study reveals that the inverse of the largest eigenvalue of the non-backtracking matrix of the graph often provides a tight lower bound for true percolation threshold. However, in more than 40 of the cases, this indicator is less predictive than the naive expectation value based solely on the moments of the degree distribution. We find that the performance of all indicators becomes worse as the value of the true percolation threshold grows. Thus, none of them represents a good proxy for robustness of extremely fragile networks. In this paper we determine the percolation threshold for an arbitrary sequence of dense graphs (G n ). Let λn be the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of G n , and let G n (p n ) be the random subgraph of G n obtained by keeping each edge independently with probability p n . We show that the appearance of a giant component in G n (p n ) has a sharp threshold at p n = 1 λ n . In fact, we prove much more: if (G n ) converges to an irreducible limit, then the density of the largest component of G n (c n) tends to the survival probability of a multi-type branching process defined in terms of this limit. Here the notions of convergence and limit are those of Borgs, Chayes, Lovasz, S6s and Vesztergombi. In addition to using basic properties of convergence, we make heavy use of the methods of Bollobas, Janson and Riordan, who used multi-type branching processes to study the emergence of a giant component in a very broad family of sparse inhomogeneous random graphs. Theoretical attempts proposed so far to describe ordinary percolation processes on real-world networks rely on the locally treelike ansatz. Such an approximation, however, holds only to a limited extent, because real graphs are often characterized by high frequencies of short loops. We present here a theoretical framework able to overcome such a limitation for the case of site percolation. Our method is based on a message passing algorithm that discounts redundant paths along triangles in the graph. We systematically test the approach on 98 real-world graphs and on synthetic networks. We find excellent accuracy in the prediction of the whole percolation diagram, with significant improvement with respect to the prediction obtained under the locally treelike approximation. Residual discrepancies between theory and simulations do not depend on clustering and can be attributed to the presence of loops longer than three edges. We present also a method to account for clustering in bond percolation, but the improvement with respect to the method based on the treelike approximation is much less apparent. We construct a tight lower bound for the site percolation threshold on an infinite graph, which becomes exact for an infinite tree. The bound is given by the inverse of the maximal eigenvalue of the Hashimoto matrix used to count nonbacktracking walks on the original graph. Our bound always exceeds the inverse spectral radius of the graph's adjacency matrix, and it is also generally tighter than the existing bound in terms of the maximum degree. We give a constructive proof for existence of such an eigenvalue in the case of a connected infinite quasitransitive graph, a graph-theoretic analog of a translationally invariant system.