Universal framework for reconstructing complex networks and node dynamics from discrete or continuous dynamics data.

Abstract

Many dynamical processes of complex systems can be understood as the dynamics of a group of nodes interacting on a given network structure. However, finding such interaction structure and node dynamics from time series of node behaviors is tough. Conventional methods focus on either network structure inference task or dynamics reconstruction problem, very few of them can work well on both. This paper proposes a universal framework for reconstructing network structure and node dynamics at the same time from observed time-series data of nodes. We use a differentiable Bernoulli sampling process to generate a candidate network structure, and we use neural networks to simulate the node dynamics based on the candidate network. We then adjust all the parameters with a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to maximize the likelihood function defined on the data. The experiments show that our model can recover various network structures and node dynamics at the same time with high accuracy. It can also work well on binary, discrete, and continuous time-series data, and the reconstruction results are robust against noise and missing information.