Resilience of weighted networks with dynamical behavior against multi-node removal

Abstract

In many real-world networks, interactions between nodes are weighted to reflect their strength, such as predator–prey interactions in the ecological network and passenger numbers in airline networks. These weighted networks are prone to cascading effects caused by minor perturbations, which can lead to catastrophic outcomes. This vulnerability highlights the importance of studying weighted network resilience to prevent system collapses. However, due to many variables and weight parameters coupled together, predicting the behavior of such a system governed by a multi-dimensional rate equation is challenging. To address this, we propose a dimension reduction technique that simplifies a multi-dimensional system into a one-dimensional state space. We applied this methodology to explore the impact of weights on the resilience of four dynamics whose weights are assigned by three weight assignment methods. The four dynamical systems are the biochemical dynamical system (B), the epidemic dynamical system (E), the regulatory dynamical system (R), and the birth–death dynamical system (BD). The results show that regardless of the weight distribution, for B, the weights are negatively correlated with the activities of the network, while for E, R, and BD, there is a positive correlation between the weights and the activities of the network. Interestingly, for B, R, and BD, the change in the weights of the system has little impact on the resilience of the system. However, for the E system, the greater the weights the more resilient the system. This study not only simplifies the complexity inherent in weighted networks but also enhances our understanding of their resilience and response to perturbations.