Effect of correlations on network controllability

A dynamical system is controllable if by imposing appropriate external signals on a subset of its nodes, it can be driven from any initial state to any desired state in finite time. Here we study the impact of various network characteristics on the minimal number of driver nodes required to control...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Yang-Yu, Posfai, Marton, Slotine, Jean-Jacques E., Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Nature Publishing Group 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97721
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7161-7812
Description
Summary:A dynamical system is controllable if by imposing appropriate external signals on a subset of its nodes, it can be driven from any initial state to any desired state in finite time. Here we study the impact of various network characteristics on the minimal number of driver nodes required to control a network. We find that clustering and modularity have no discernible impact, but the symmetries of the underlying matching problem can produce linear, quadratic or no dependence on degree correlation coefficients, depending on the nature of the underlying correlations. The results are supported by numerical simulations and help narrow the observed gap between the predicted and the observed number of driver nodes in real networks.