Power-law statistics and universal scaling in the absence of criticality
Open accessAbstract
Critical states are sometimes identified experimentally through power-law statistics or universal scaling functions. We show here that such features naturally emerge from networks in self-sustained irregular regimes away from criticality. In these regimes, statistical physics theory of large interacting systems predict a regime where the nodes have independent and identically distributed dynamics. We thus investigated the statistics of a system in which units are replaced by independent stochastic surrogates and found the same power-law statistics, indicating that these are not sufficient to establish criticality. We rather suggest that these are universal features of large-scale networks when considered macroscopically. These results put caution on the interpretation of scaling laws found in nature.
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Hallucinogenic compounds expanded the repertoire of harmonic modes, increasing spectral diversity and shifting the distribution of modes toward power-law distributions.
“Intriguingly, hallucinogenic compounds expanded the repertoire of these harmonic modes (Atasoy et al., 2017), increasing spectral diversity and shifting the distribution of modes toward power-law distributions, a putative—albeit controversial (Touboul and Destexhe, 2017)—hallmark of criticality (Fontenele et al., 2019).”
From An Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) of Consciousness (2020) · cites this paper as Touboul and Destexhe, 2017
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Natural Image Statistics and Neural Representation
Simoncelli, E. P., & Olshausen, B. A. (2001) · Annual Review of Neuroscience · doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.1193 · Cited by 2,460 · see citing works
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Criticality between Cortical States
Fontenele, A. J., de Vasconcelos, N. A. P., Feliciano, T., Aguiar, L. A. A., Soares-Cunha, C., Coimbra, B., Dalla Porta, L., Ribeiro, S., Rodrigues, A. J., Sousa, N., et al. (2019) · Physical Review Letters · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.208101 · Cited by 237 · see citing works
Safron, A. (2020) · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.3389/frai.2020.00030 · Cited by 133 · see citing works
“…compounds expanded the repertoire of these harmonic modes (Atasoy et al., 2017), increasing spectral diversity and shifting the distribution of modes toward power-law distributions, a putative—albeit controversial (Touboul and Destexhe, 2017)—hallmark of criticality (Fontenele et al., 2019).”
Background
- Authors
- Touboul, J., & Destexhe, A.
- Affiliations
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- ORCID
- Touboul, Jonathan
- Venue
- Physical Review E
- Publisher
- American Physical Society (APS)
- Published
- 2017-01-31
- Volume
- 95
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 012413-012413
- ISSN
- 2470-0045 (ISSN-L)
- 2470-0053
- OpenAlex
- W1586234143
- Cited by
- 210
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 52 · 2021: 31 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 9.32
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Locations
- Physical review. E (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Condensed Matter Physics › Theoretical and Computational Physics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis
- Keywords
- power-law statistics, universal scaling, criticality, complex networks, large-scale networks, scaling laws
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