English

Reentrant phase transitions in threshold driven contagion on multiplex networks

Physics and Society 2019-10-23 v2 Social and Information Networks

Abstract

Models of threshold driven contagion explain the cascading spread of information, behavior, systemic risk, and epidemics on social, financial and biological networks. At odds with empirical observation, these models predict that single-layer unweighted networks become resistant to global cascades after reaching sufficient connectivity. We investigate threshold driven contagion on weight heterogeneous multiplex networks and show that they can remain susceptible to global cascades at any level of connectivity, and with increasing edge density pass through alternating phases of stability and instability in the form of reentrant phase transitions of contagion. Our results provide a novel theoretical explanation for the observation of large scale contagion in highly connected but heterogeneous networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.08306,
  title  = {Reentrant phase transitions in threshold driven contagion on multiplex networks},
  author = {Samuel Unicomb and Gerardo Iñiguez and János Kertész and Márton Karsai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.08306},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

26 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:20:49.542Z