Bunching of extreme events on complex network

Abstract

Extreme events such as earthquakes, floods, and power blackouts often display burst phenomena where multiple extreme events occur in quick succession or in bunches. This study examines bunching of extreme events on a complex network using a random walk transport model. We find that in a modular network, a small cluster sparsely connected with the rest, shows bunching and correlations among extreme events. The bunching and correlations emerge naturally in our system. We use several characterization techniques, namely the recurrence time distribution, autocorrelation function, bursty trains, burstiness parameter and memory coefficient to quantify the bunching and correlations of extreme events. Our study shows that the network structure plays a significant role in the bunching of extreme events.