Higher-order social-ecological network as a simplicial complex

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel higher-order social-ecological network model using simplicial complexes, enabling comprehensive representation of complex interactions within social-ecological systems beyond traditional pairwise links.

Contribution

It proposes a new combinatorial definition of social-ecological networks as simplicial complexes, capturing all interaction orders and heterogeneity within social-ecological systems.

Findings

Better representation of complex social-ecological interactions

Enhanced understanding of system structural details

Deeper insights into emergent behaviors

Abstract

A social-ecological network is a formal representation of a corresponding social-ecological system, and encodes a relation within a given system as an interaction. Conventionally, such networks have been defined as encoding and representing pairwise interactions among the fundamental units of the system. This work proposes a combinatorial definition of social-ecological network by means of its structure as a simplicial complex. The proposed definition is a comprehensive one that takes into account the heterogeneity of interactions within a given SES, and the higher-order social-ecological network modelled using this definition is able to represent the modelled SES by capturing all orders of interactions within the system. Such a social-ecological network consequently, is better equipped to capture and represent the structural details of the real-world SES, and is thus capable of facilitating a deeper insight into the complex behaviour of the represented SES emergent through the higher-order interactions within the system, as compared to the conventional graph-theoretic network that exclusively models pairwise interactions.