Spectral dynamics of guided edge removals and identifying transient amplifiers for death-Birth updating

Abstract: The paper deals with two interrelated topics, identifying transient amplifiers in an iterative process and analyzing the process by its spectral dynamics, which is the change in the graph spectra by edge manipulations. Transient amplifiers are networks representing population structures which shift the balance between natural selection and random drift. Thus, amplifiers are highly relevant for understanding the relationships between spatial structures and evolutionary dynamics. We study an iterative procedure to identify transient amplifiers for death-Birth updating. The algorithm starts with a regular input graph and iteratively removes edges until desired structures are achieved. Thus, a sequence of candidate graphs is obtained. The edge removals are guided by quantities derived from the sequence of candidate graphs. Moreover, we are interested in the Laplacian spectra of the candidate graphs and analyze the iterative process by its spectral dynamics. The results show that although transient amplifiers for death-Birth updating are rare, a substantial number of them can be obtained by the proposed procedure. The graphs identified share structural properties and have some similarity to dumbbell and barbell graphs. Also, the spectral dynamics possesses characteristic features useful for deducing links between structural and spectral properties and for distinguishing transient amplifiers among evolutionary graphs in general.