English

Detecting structural perturbations from time series with deep learning

Physics and Society 2020-06-11 v1 Machine Learning Applications Machine Learning

Abstract

Small disturbances can trigger functional breakdowns in complex systems. A challenging task is to infer the structural cause of a disturbance in a networked system, soon enough to prevent a catastrophe. We present a graph neural network approach, borrowed from the deep learning paradigm, to infer structural perturbations from functional time series. We show our data-driven approach outperforms typical reconstruction methods while meeting the accuracy of Bayesian inference. We validate the versatility and performance of our approach with epidemic spreading, population dynamics, and neural dynamics, on various network structures: random networks, scale-free networks, 25 real food-web systems, and the C. Elegans connectome. Moreover, we report that our approach is robust to data corruption. This work uncovers a practical avenue to study the resilience of real-world complex systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.05232,
  title  = {Detecting structural perturbations from time series with deep learning},
  author = {Edward Laurence and Charles Murphy and Guillaume St-Onge and Xavier Roy-Pomerleau and Vincent Thibeault},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.05232},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Main paper:10 pages, 5 figures | Supplementary material: 8 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:10:39.250Z