We consider the classic Moran process modeling the spread of genetic mutations, as extended to structured populations by (Nature, 2005). In this process, individuals are the vertices of a connected graph G. Initially, there is a single mutant vertex, chosen uniformly at random. In each step, a random vertex is selected for reproduction with a probability proportional to its fitness: mutants have fitness r > 1, while non-mutants have fitness 1. The vertex chosen to reproduce places a copy of itself to a uniformly random neighbor in G, replacing the individual that was there. The process ends when the mutation either reaches fixation (i.e., all vertices are mutants), or gets extinct. The principal quantity of interest is the probability with which each of the two outcomes occurs. A problem that has received significant attention recently concerns the existence of families of graphs, called strong amplifiers of selection, for which the fixation probability tends to 1 as the order n of the graph increases, and the existence of strong suppressors of selection, for which this probability tends to 0. For the case of directed graphs, it is known that both strong amplifiers and suppressors exist. For the case of undirected graphs, however, the problem has remained open, and the general belief has been that neither strong amplifiers nor suppressors exist. In this paper we disprove this belief, by providing the first examples of such graphs. The strong amplifier we present has fixation probability 1 − ˜ O(n^ −1 3), and the strong suppressor has fixation probability ˜O(n^−1 4). Both graph constructions are surprisingly simple. We also prove a general upper bound of 1 − ˜Ω(n^−1 3) on the fixation probability of any undirected graph. Hence, our strong amplifier is existentially optimal.
Finally, similar stochastic processes have been use to model dynamics other than evolutionary ones, such as the spread of influence in social networks @cite_23 , the spread of epidemics @cite_29 , the emergence of monopolies @cite_33 , or interacting particle systems @cite_26 .
@cite_29 @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_23
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Diffusion of information, spread of rumors and infectious diseases are all instances of stochastic processes that occur over the edges of an underlying network. Many times networks over which contagions spread are unobserved, and such networks are often dynamic and change over time. In this paper, we investigate the problem of inferring dynamic networks based on information diffusion data. We assume there is an unobserved dynamic network that changes over time, while we observe the results of a dynamic process spreading over the edges of the network. The task then is to infer the edges and the dynamics of the underlying network. We develop an on-line algorithm that relies on stochastic convex optimization to efficiently solve the dynamic network inference problem. We apply our algorithm to information diffusion among 3.3 million mainstream media and blog sites and experiment with more than 179 million different pieces of information spreading over the network in a one year period. We study the evolution of information pathways in the online media space and find interesting insights. Information pathways for general recurrent topics are more stable across time than for on-going news events. Clusters of news media sites and blogs often emerge and vanish in matter of days for on-going news events. Major social movements and events involving civil population, such as the Libyan' s civil war or Syria' s uprise, lead to an increased amount of information pathways among blogs as well as in the overall increase in the network centrality of blogs and social media sites. The systematic study of large-scale networks has unveiled the ubiquitous presence of connectivity patterns characterized by large-scale heterogeneities and unbounded statistical fluctuations. These features affect dramatically the behavior of the diffusion processes occurring on networks, determining the ensuing statistical properties of their evolution pattern and dynamics. In this article, we present a stochastic computational framework for the forecast of global epidemics that considers the complete worldwide air travel infrastructure complemented with census population data. We address two basic issues in global epidemic modeling: (i) we study the role of the large scale properties of the airline transportation network in determining the global diffusion pattern of emerging diseases; and (ii) we evaluate the reliability of forecasts and outbreak scenarios with respect to the intrinsic stochasticity of disease transmission and traffic flows. To address these issues we define a set of quantitative measures able to characterize the level of heterogeneity and predictability of the epidemic pattern. These measures may be used for the analysis of containment policies and epidemic risk assessment. This paper reports statistical analyses performed on simulated data from a stochastic multi-agent model of speculative behaviour in a financial market. The price dynamics resulting from this artificial market process exhibits the same type of scaling laws as do empirical data from stock markets and foreign exchange markets: (i) one observes scaling in the probability distribution of relative price changes with a Pareto exponent around 2.6, (ii) volatility shows significant long-range correlation with a self-similarity parameter H around 0.85. This happens although we assume that news about the intrinsic or fundamental value of the asset follows a white noise process and, hence, incorporation of news about fundamental factors is insufficient to explain either of the characteristics (i) or (ii). As a consequence, in our model, the main stylised facts of financial data originate from the working of the market itself and one need not resort to scaling in unobservable extraneous signals as an explanation of the source of scaling in financial prices. The emergence of power laws can be explained by the existence of a critical state which is repeatedly approached in the course of the system's development. Evolutionary dynamics has been traditionally studied in the context of homogeneous populations, mainly described by the Moran process [P. Moran, Random processes in genetics, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 54 (1) (1958) 60-71]. Recently, this approach has been generalized in [E. Lieberman, C. Hauert, M.A. Nowak, Evolutionary dynamics on graphs, Nature 433 (2005) 312-316] by arranging individuals on the nodes of a network (in general, directed). In this setting, the existence of directed arcs enables the simulation of extreme phenomena, where the fixation probability of a randomly placed mutant (i.e., the probability that the offspring of the mutant eventually spread over the whole population) is arbitrarily small or large. On the other hand, undirected networks (i.e., undirected graphs) seem to have a smoother behavior, and thus it is more challenging to find suppressors amplifiers of selection, that is, graphs with smaller greater fixation probability than the complete graph (i.e., the homogeneous population). In this paper we focus on undirected graphs. We present the first class of undirected graphs which act as suppressors of selection, by achieving a fixation probability that is at most one half of that of the complete graph, as the number of vertices increases. Moreover, we provide some generic upper and lower bounds for the fixation probability of general undirected graphs. As our main contribution, we introduce the natural alternative of the model proposed in [E. Lieberman, C. Hauert, M.A. Nowak, Evolutionary dynamics on graphs, Nature 433 (2005) 312-316]. In our new evolutionary model, all individuals interact simultaneously and the result is a compromise between aggressive and non-aggressive individuals. We prove that our new model of mutual influences admits a potential function, which guarantees the convergence of the system for any graph topology and any initial fitness vector of the individuals. Furthermore, we prove fast convergence to the stable state for the case of the complete graph, as well as we provide almost tight bounds on the limit fitness of the individuals. Apart from being important on its own, this new evolutionary model appears to be useful also in the abstract modeling of control mechanisms over invading populations in networks. We demonstrate this by introducing and analyzing two alternative control approaches, for which we bound the time needed to stabilize to the ''healthy'' state of the system.