We study the betweenness centrality of fractal and non-fractal scale-free network models as well as real networks. We show that the correlation between degree and betweenness centrality C of nodes is much weaker in fractal network models compared to non-fractal models. We also show that nodes of...

We study the structure of business firm networks in the Life Sciences (LS) and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sectors. We analyze business firm networks and scale-free models with degree distribution P(q) proportional to (q + c)^-λ using the method of k-shell decomposition....

The presence of significant cross-correlations between the synchronous time evolution of a pair of equity returns is a well-known empirical fact. The Pearson correlation is commonly used to indicate the level of similarity in the price changes for a given pair of stocks, but it does not measure...

A time series can be decomposed into two sub-series: a magnitude series and a sign series. Here we analyze separately the scaling properties of the magnitude series and the sign series using the increment time series of cardiac interbeat intervals as an example. We find that time series having...

We develop a method for the multifractal characterization of nonstationary time series, which is based on a generalization of the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). We relate our multifractal DFA method to the standard partition function-based multifractal formalism, and prove that both...

We present a scaling Ansatz for the distribution function of the shortest paths connecting any two points on a percolating cluster which accounts for (i) the effect of the finite size of the system, and (ii) the dependence of this distribution on the site occupancy probability p. We present...

As economic entities become increasingly interconnected, a shock in a financial network can provoke significant cascading failures throughout the system. To study the systemic risk of financial systems, we create a bi-partite banking network model composed of banks and bank assets and propose a...

We study the cascading dynamics immediately before and immediately after 219 market shocks. We define the time of a market shock T_{c} to be the time for which the market volatility V(T_{c}) has a peak that exceeds a predetermined threshold. The cascade of high volatility "aftershocks" triggered...

We study the daily trading volume volatility of 17,197 stocks in the U.S. stock markets during the period 1989--2008 and analyze the time return intervals $\tau$ between volume volatilities above a given threshold q. For different thresholds q, the probability density function P_q(\tau) scales...

This brief overview is designed to introduce some of the advances that have occurred in our understanding of percolation phenomena. We organize our presentation around three simple questions: (i) What are percolation phenomena? (ii) Why do we care? (iii) What do we actually do? To answer the...