Recovering network topologies via Taylor expansion and compressive sensing

Gaining knowledge of the intrinsic topology of a complex dynamical network is the precondition to understand its evolutionary mechanisms and to control its dynamical and functional behaviors. In this article, a general framework is developed to recover topologies of complex networks with completely unknown node dynamics based on Taylor expansion and compressive sensing. Numerical simulations illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, this method is found to have good robustness to weak stochastic perturbations. Finally, the impact of two major factors on the topology identification performance is evaluated. This method provides a natural and direct point to reconstruct network topologies from measurable data, which is likely to have potential applicability in a wide range of fields. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.