Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems

Complex systems consist of multiple interacting subsystems, whose nonlinear interactions can result in unanticipated (emergent) system events. Extant systems analysis approaches fail to detect such emergent properties, since they analyze each subsystem separately and arrive at decisions typically th...

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Main Authors: Eugene Santos, Yan Zhao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2017-01-01
Series:Complexity
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/3460919
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author Eugene Santos
Yan Zhao
author_facet Eugene Santos
Yan Zhao
author_sort Eugene Santos
collection DOAJ
description Complex systems consist of multiple interacting subsystems, whose nonlinear interactions can result in unanticipated (emergent) system events. Extant systems analysis approaches fail to detect such emergent properties, since they analyze each subsystem separately and arrive at decisions typically through linear aggregations of individual analysis results. In this paper, we propose a quantitative definition of emergence for complex systems. We also propose a framework to detect emergent properties given observations of its subsystems. This framework, based on a probabilistic graphical model called Bayesian Knowledge Bases (BKBs), learns individual subsystem dynamics from data, probabilistically and structurally fuses said dynamics into a single complex system dynamics, and detects emergent properties. Fusion is the central element of our approach to account for situations when a common variable may have different probabilistic distributions in different subsystems. We evaluate our detection performance against a baseline approach (Bayesian Network ensemble) on synthetic testbeds from UCI datasets. To do so, we also introduce a method to simulate and a metric to measure discrepancies that occur with shared/common variables. Experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baseline. In addition, we demonstrate that this framework has uniform polynomial time complexity across all three learning, fusion, and reasoning procedures.
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spelling doaj-art-8ceec7ee0ca646bf8c80b254a4e68f702025-02-03T05:43:52ZengWileyComplexity1076-27871099-05262017-01-01201710.1155/2017/34609193460919Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex SystemsEugene Santos0Yan Zhao1Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USAThayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USAComplex systems consist of multiple interacting subsystems, whose nonlinear interactions can result in unanticipated (emergent) system events. Extant systems analysis approaches fail to detect such emergent properties, since they analyze each subsystem separately and arrive at decisions typically through linear aggregations of individual analysis results. In this paper, we propose a quantitative definition of emergence for complex systems. We also propose a framework to detect emergent properties given observations of its subsystems. This framework, based on a probabilistic graphical model called Bayesian Knowledge Bases (BKBs), learns individual subsystem dynamics from data, probabilistically and structurally fuses said dynamics into a single complex system dynamics, and detects emergent properties. Fusion is the central element of our approach to account for situations when a common variable may have different probabilistic distributions in different subsystems. We evaluate our detection performance against a baseline approach (Bayesian Network ensemble) on synthetic testbeds from UCI datasets. To do so, we also introduce a method to simulate and a metric to measure discrepancies that occur with shared/common variables. Experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baseline. In addition, we demonstrate that this framework has uniform polynomial time complexity across all three learning, fusion, and reasoning procedures.http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/3460919
spellingShingle Eugene Santos
Yan Zhao
Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems
Complexity
title Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems
title_full Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems
title_fullStr Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems
title_full_unstemmed Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems
title_short Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems
title_sort automatic emergence detection in complex systems
url http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/3460919
work_keys_str_mv AT eugenesantos automaticemergencedetectionincomplexsystems
AT yanzhao automaticemergencedetectionincomplexsystems