Effect of heterogeneous weights on the average trapping time and two types of random walks in weighted directed networks

Abstract

In this paper, we define a class of weighted directed networks with the weight of its edge dominated by a weight parameter w. According to the construction of the networks, we study two types of random walks in the weighted directed networks with a trap fixed on the central node, i.e., standard random walks and mixed random walks. For the standard random walks, the trapping process is controlled by a weight parameter w which changes the transition probability of random walks. For the mixed random walks including nonnearest-neighbor hopping, the trapping process is steered by a stochastic parameter [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] changes the walking rule. For the above two techniques, we derive both analytically the average trapping time (ATT) as the measure of trapping efficiency, and the obtained analytical expressions are in good agreement with the corresponding numerical solutions for different values of w and [Formula: see text]. The obtained results indicate that ATT scales superlinearly with network size Nn and the weight parameter w changes simultaneously the prefactor and the leading scalings of ATT, while the stochastic parameter [Formula: see text] can only alter the prefactor of ATT and leave the leading scalings of ATT unchanged. This work may help in paving the way for understanding the effects of the link weight and nonnearest-neighbor hopping in real complex systems.