The why, how, and when of representations for complex systems Leo Torres Ann S. Blevins
[email protected] [email protected] Network Science Institute, Department of Bioengineering, Northeastern University University of Pennsylvania Danielle S. Bassett Tina Eliassi-Rad
[email protected] [email protected] Department of Bioengineering, Network Science Institute and University of Pennsylvania Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University June 5, 2020 arXiv:2006.02870v1 [cs.SI] 4 Jun 2020 1 Contents 1 Introduction 4 1.1 Definitions . .5 2 Dependencies by the system, for the system 6 2.1 Subset dependencies . .7 2.2 Temporal dependencies . .8 2.3 Spatial dependencies . 10 2.4 External sources of dependencies . 11 3 Formal representations of complex systems 12 3.1 Graphs . 13 3.2 Simplicial Complexes . 13 3.3 Hypergraphs . 15 3.4 Variations . 15 3.5 Encoding system dependencies . 18 4 Mathematical relationships between formalisms 21 5 Methods suitable for each representation 24 5.1 Methods for graphs . 24 5.2 Methods for simplicial complexes . 25 5.3 Methods for hypergraphs . 27 5.4 Methods and dependencies . 28 6 Examples 29 6.1 Coauthorship . 29 6.2 Email communications . 32 7 Applications 35 8 Discussion and Conclusion 36 9 Acknowledgments 38 10 Citation diversity statement 38 2 Abstract Complex systems thinking is applied to a wide variety of domains, from neuroscience to computer science and economics. The wide variety of implementations has resulted in two key challenges: the progenation of many domain-specific strategies that are seldom revisited or questioned, and the siloing of ideas within a domain due to inconsistency of complex systems language.