Related papers: Disentangling collective trends from local dynamic…
In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving…
Recently a method which employs computing of fluctuations in a measure of nonlinear similarity based on local recurrence properties in a univariate time series, was introduced to identify distinct dynamical regimes and transitions between…
Human interactions can be either positive or negative, giving rise to different complex social or anti-social phenomena. The dynamics of these interactions often lead to certain spatio-temporal patterns and complex networks, which can be…
Urbanization is a phenomenon of concern for planning and public health: projections are difficult because of policy changes and natural events, and indicators are multiple. There are previous studies of development that used fractals, but…
Analysis of the urban population fraction data for sixteen populous countries over the last fifty years reveals a universal increase in urbanization, exhibiting four qualitatively distinct temporal patterns: (i) continuously accelerating…
Non-communicable diseases like diabetes, obesity and certain forms of cancer have been increasing in many countries at alarming levels. A difficulty in the conception of policies to reverse these trends is the identification of the drivers…
Metals owe their unique mechanical properties to how defects emerge and propagate within their crystal structure under stress. However, the mechanisms leading from the early emerging (local) defects to the amplification of dislocations…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance…
Economic growth is measured as the rate of relative change in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Yet, when incomes follow random multiplicative growth, the ensemble-average (GDP per capita) growth rate is higher than the time-average…
Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. Thus, understanding what factors influence urban crime in…
The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion…
Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in…
Socioeconomic segregation is considered one of the main factors behind the emergence of large-scale inequalities in urban areas, and its characterisation is an active area of research in urban studies. There are currently many available…
Obesity is currently affecting very large portions of the global population. Effective prevention and treatment starts at the early age and requires objective knowledge of population-level behavior on the region/neighborhood scale. To this…
The problem of estimating trend and seasonal variation in time-series data has been studied over several decades, although mostly using single time series. This paper studies the problem of estimating these components from functional data,…
In animal societies as well as in human crowds, many observed collective behaviours result from self-organized processes based on local interactions among individuals. However, models of crowd dynamics are still lacking a systematic…
More than one-third of the adult population in the United States is obese. Obesity has been linked to factors such as, genetics, diet, physical activity and the environment. However, evidence indicating associations between the built…