Abstracts Category : Other

Network Reconstruction and Vulnerability Analysis of Financial Networks

by Nathan Scott Woodbury

Passive network reconstruction is the process of learning a structured (networked) representation of a dynamic system through the use of known information about the structure of the system as well as data collected by observing the inputs into a system along with the resultant outputs. This work demonstrates an improvement on an existing network reconstruction algorithm so that the algorithm is capable of consistently and perfectly reconstructing a network when system inputs and outputs are measured without error. This work then extends the improved network reconstruction algorithm so that it functions even in the presence of noise as well as the situation where inputs into the system are unknown. Furthermore, this work demonstrates the capability of the new extended algorithms by reconstructing financial networks from stock market data, and then performing an analysis to understand the vulnerabilities of the reconstructed network to destabilization through localized attacks. The creation of these improved and extended algorithms has opened many theoretical questions, paving the way for future research into network reconstruction.