Neural Symbolic Regression of Complex Network Dynamics

Complex networks describe important structures in nature and society, composed of nodes and the edges that connect them. The evolution of these networks is typically described by dynamics, which are labor-intensive and require expert knowledge to derive. However, because the complex network involves noisy observations from multiple trajectories of nodes, existing symbolic regression methods are either not applicable or ineffective on its dynamics. In this paper, we propose Physically Inspired Neural Dynamics Symbolic Regression (PI-NDSR), a method based on neural networks and genetic programming to automatically learn the symbolic expression of dynamics. Our method consists of two key components: a Physically Inspired Neural Dynamics (PIND) to augment and denoise trajectories through observed trajectory interpolation; and a coordinated genetic search algorithm to derive symbolic expressions. This algorithm leverages references of node dynamics and edge dynamics from neural dynamics to avoid overfitted expressions in symbolic space. We evaluate our method on synthetic datasets generated by various dynamics and real datasets on disease spreading. The results demonstrate that PI-NDSR outperforms the existing method in terms of both recovery probability and error. Complex networks (Gerstner et al., 2014; Gao et al., 2016; Bashan et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2011) describe important structures in nature and society, which is composed of a set of nodes and a set of edges that connect them. Complex networks can model various real-world systems, including social networks (Kitsak et al., 2010), epidemic networks (Pastor-Satorras & Vespignani, 2001), brain networks (Laurence et al., 2019; Wilson & Cowan, 1972), and transportation networks (Kaluza et al., 2010). Extensive works (Zang & Wang, 2020; Murphy et al., 2021; Gao & Yan, 2022) have been conducted to analyze the dynamics of complex networks (Pastor-Satorras et al., 2015; MacArthur, 1970; Kuramoto & Kuramoto, 1984), which is crucial for understanding the underlying mechanisms of complex systems and predicting their future behaviors.