Related papers: The Characteristic Time Scale of Cultural Evolutio…

Many stochastic complex systems are characterized by the fact that their configuration space doesn't grow exponentially as a function of the degrees of freedom. The use of scaling expansions is a natural way to measure the asymptotic growth…

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…

Real-world deployment of machine learning models is challenging because data evolves over time. While no model can work when data evolves in an arbitrary fashion, if there is some pattern to these changes, we might be able to design methods…

In this paper, we propose a new time-aware dissimilarity measure that takes into account the temporal dimension. Observations that are close in the description space, but distant in time are considered as dissimilar. We also propose a…

Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…

Recent studies have shown great promise in applying graph neural networks for multivariate time series forecasting, where the interactions of time series are described as a graph structure and the variables are represented as the graph…

Scale independence is a ubiquitous feature of complex systems which implies a highly skewed distribution of resources with no characteristic scale. Research has long focused on why systems as varied as protein networks, evolution and stock…

Human mobility is a fundamental process underpinning socioeconomic life and urban structure. Classic theories, such as egocentric activity spaces and central place theory, provide crucial insights into specific facets of movement, like…

The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…

The increasing availability of time --and space-- resolved data describing human activities and interactions gives insights into both static and dynamic properties of human behavior. In practice, nevertheless, real-world datasets can often…

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building…

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…

Social dynamics are shaped by each person's actions, as well as by collective trends that emerge when individuals are brought together. These latter kind of influences escape anyone's control. They are, instead, dominated by aggregate…

Dynamical processes on time-varying complex networks are key to understanding and modeling a broad variety of processes in socio-technical systems. Here we focus on empirical temporal networks of human proximity and we aim at understanding…

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…

The dynamics of time-reversible systems are statistically indistinguishable when observed forward or backward in time. A rich literature of statistical methods to distinguish irreversible dynamics from the reversible dynamics of linear,…

A quantitative understanding of cities' demographic dynamics is becoming a potentially useful tool for planning sustainable growth. The concomitant theory should reveal details of the cities' past and also of its interaction with nearby…

Cultural values vary significantly around the world. Despite a large heterogeneity, similarities across national cultures are present. This paper studies cross-country culture heterogeneity via the joint inference of country-specific copula…

Motivated by empirical evidence on the interplay between geography, population density and societal interaction, we propose a generative process for the evolution of social structure in cities. Our analytical and simulation results predict…

In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…