Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 20: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics IV (with BP, DY)

SOE 20.2: Talk

Thursday, March 17, 2011, 15:15–15:30, GÖR 226

Activity dependent criticality and threshold networks closer to biology — •Matthias Rybarsch and Stefan Bornholdt — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Bremen, Otto-Hahn-Allee, 28359 Bremen

Spin models of neural networks and genetic networks are simple and elegant and benefit from the statistical mechanics toolkit developed for spin glasses and magnetic systems. However, the conventional choice of variables in spin systems may cause problems in some models of biological systems when parameter choices and normalizations are unrealistic. We here consider a prototypical network model, that is biologically plausible in the local mechanisms represented in the model with each node locally defined and no non-local fine tuning required. As a result this model yields biologically plausible ensemble statistics for randomly wired networks. We explore the critical properties of such random networks and find a more realistic behavior as compared to random Boolean networks or classical spin versions of threshold networks. Finally we observe that the present model allows a simpler implementation of recent models of budding yeast and fission yeast networks.