Characterizing the effect of population heterogeneity on evolutionary dynamics on complex networks

Abstract

Recently, the impact of network structure on evolutionary dynamics has been at the center of attention when studying the evolutionary process of structured populations. This paper aims at finding out the key structural feature of network to capture its impact on evolutionary dynamics. To this end, a novel concept called heat heterogeneity is introduced to characterize the structural heterogeneity of network, and the correlation between heat heterogeneity of structure and outcome of evolutionary dynamics is further investigated on various networks. It is found that the heat heterogeneity mainly determines the impact of network structure on evolutionary dynamics on complex networks. In detail, the heat heterogeneity readjusts the selection effect on evolutionary dynamics. Networks with high heat heterogeneity amplify the selection effect on the birth-death process and suppress the selection effect on the death-birth process. Based on the above results, an effective algorithm is proposed to generate selection adjusters with desired size and average degree.