A measure of dissimilarity between diffusive processes on networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present a framework to compare the differences in the occupation probabilities of two random walk processes, which can be generated by modifications of the network or the transition probabilities between the nodes of the same network. We explore a dissimilarity measure defined in terms of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the normalized Laplacian of each process. This formalism is implemented to examine differences in the diffusive dynamics described by circulant matrices, the effect of new edges, and the rewiring in networks as well as to evaluate divergences in the transport in degree-biased random walks and random walks with stochastic reset. Our results provide a general tool to compare dynamical processes on networks considering the evolution of states and capturing the complexity of these structures.