Stability and Bifurcations of Equilibria in Networks with Piecewise Linear Interactions

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (11) ◽  
pp. 2130032
Author(s):  
William Duncan ◽  
Tomas Gedeon

In this paper, we study equilibria of differential equation models for networks. When interactions between nodes are taken to be piecewise constant, an efficient combinatorial analysis can be used to characterize the equilibria. When the piecewise constant functions are replaced with piecewise linear functions, the equilibria are preserved as long as the piecewise linear functions are sufficiently steep. Therefore the combinatorial analysis can be leveraged to understand a broader class of interactions. To better understand how broad this class is, we explicitly characterize how steep the piecewise linear functions must be for the correspondence between equilibria to hold. To do so, we analyze the steady state and Hopf bifurcations which cause a change in the number or stability of equilibria as slopes are decreased. Additionally, we show how to choose a subset of parameters so that the correspondence between equilibria holds for the smallest possible slopes when the remaining parameters are fixed.

Author(s):  
Arturo Sarmiento-Reyes ◽  
Luis Hernandez-Martinez ◽  
Miguel Angel Gutierrez de Anda ◽  
Francisco Javier Castro Gonzalez

We describe a sense in which mesh duality is equivalent to Legendre duality. That is, a general pair of meshes, which satisfy a definition of duality for meshes, are shown to be the projection of a pair of piecewise linear functions that are dual to each other in the sense of a Legendre dual transformation. In applications the latter functions can be a tangent plane approximation to a smoother function, and a chordal plane approximation to its Legendre dual. Convex examples include one from meteorology, and also the relation between the Delaunay mesh and the Voronoi tessellation. The latter are shown to be the projections of tangent plane and chordal approximations to the same paraboloid.


Algorithms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Griewank ◽  
Andrea Walther

For piecewise linear functions f : R n ↦ R we show how their abs-linear representation can be extended to yield simultaneously their decomposition into a convex f ˇ and a concave part f ^ , including a pair of generalized gradients g ˇ ∈ R n ∋ g ^ . The latter satisfy strict chain rules and can be computed in the reverse mode of algorithmic differentiation, at a small multiple of the cost of evaluating f itself. It is shown how f ˇ and f ^ can be expressed as a single maximum and a single minimum of affine functions, respectively. The two subgradients g ˇ and − g ^ are then used to drive DCA algorithms, where the (convex) inner problem can be solved in finitely many steps, e.g., by a Simplex variant or the true steepest descent method. Using a reflection technique to update the gradients of the concave part, one can ensure finite convergence to a local minimizer of f, provided the Linear Independence Kink Qualification holds. For piecewise smooth objectives the approach can be used as an inner method for successive piecewise linearization.


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