# Matjaž Perc's research while affiliated with University of Maribor and other places

## Publications (564)

Article
The self-protection of alliances against external invaders is a key concept behind the maintenance of biodiversity in the face of natural selection. But since these alliances, which can be formed by different numbers of competitors, can also compete against each other, it is important to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Here, we therefore c...
Article
Collective cooperation and social mobility are ubiquitous in human societies. Due to information sharing and the complexity of everyday life, multidimensional mobility is also common, for example when moving into different districts of a city for better education or when settling permanently abroad due to better job prospects. Nevertheless, it is n...
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In this paper, we define characteristic axioms for 3D matrix games and extend the definitions of the decision criteria under uncertainty to three dimensions in order to investigate the simultaneous effect of two different states on the decision process. We first redefine the Laplace, Wald, Hurwicz, and Savage criteria in 3D. We present a new defini...
Preprint
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A wealth of evidence shows that real world networks are endowed with the small-world property i.e., that the maximal distance between any two of their nodes scales logarithmically rather than linearly with their size. In addition, most social networks are organized so that no individual is more than six connections apart from any other, an empirica...
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Digital technologies provide a convenient way for the public to participate in environmental governance. Therefore, by means of a two-stage evolutionary model, a new mechanism for promoting public cooperation is proposed to accomplish environmental collaborative governance. Interactive effects of government–enterprise environmental governance are f...
Article
Recent studies have shown that personal resources have a significant impact on the dynamics of epidemic spreading. In previous studies, the main way for individuals to be able to obtain resources was through pairwise interactions. However, the human relationship network is often characterized also by group interactions, not just by pairwise interac...
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Brain networks are characterized by flexible patterns of pairwise correlations and information exchange between different brain regions. Such dynamic patterns are crucial for an efficient response of the brain to environmental and cognitive demands. We here propose that the collective oscillations in the brain can provide a mechanism to control dyn...
Article
The time series of cryptocurrency prices provide a unique window into their value and fluctuations. In this study, an ordinal partition network is constructed using the price signals, and its features are extracted to investigate the variations. Our research shows that the proposed method indeed works well for analyzing price fluctuations. We apply...
Article
In this paper, we extend and apply the Matrix Norm (MN) approach to the nonzero-sum bimatrix games. We present preliminary results regarding the convergence of the MN approaches. We provide a notation for expressing nonzero-sum bimatrix games in terms of two matrix games using the idea of separation of a bimatrix game into two different matrix game...
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Recent research has shown that criminal networks have complex organizational structures, but whether this can be used to predict static and dynamic properties of criminal networks remains little explored. Here, by combining graph representation learning and machine learning methods, we show that structural properties of political corruption, police...
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Success breeds more success, the rich get richer, and the powerful get even more powerful. These are often true in human societies and describe the situation where whatever advantages one has in life frequently beget further advantages over time. The social sciences often describe this phenomenon as the Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, and...
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Recent research has shown that criminal networks have complex organizational structures, but whether this can be used to predict static and dynamic properties of criminal networks remains little explored. Here, by combining graph representation learning and machine learning methods, we show that structural properties of political corruption, police...
Article
Our social interactions vary over time and they depend on various factors that determine our preferences and goals, both in personal and professional terms. Researches have shown that this plays an important role in promoting cooperation and prosocial behavior in general. Indeed, it is natural to assume that ties among cooperators would become stro...
Article
Identifying the most influential nodes in networked systems is of vital importance to optimize their function and control. Several scalar metrics have been proposed to that effect, but the recent shift in focus towards network structures which go beyond a simple collection of dyadic interactions has rendered them void of performance guarantees. We...
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The current pandemic has disproportionally affected the workforce. To improve our understanding of the role that occupations play in the transmission of COVID-19, we analyse real-world network data that were collected in Bucharest between August 1st and October 31st 2020. The data record sex, age, and occupation of 6895 patients and the 13,272 peop...
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Most environments favor defection over cooperation due to natural selection. Nonetheless, the emergence of cooperation is omnipresent in many biological, social, and economic systems, quite contrary to the well-celebrated Darwinian theory of evolution. Much research has been devoted to better understanding how and why cooperation persists among sel...
Preprint
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Brain networks are characterized by flexible patterns of pairwise correlations and information exchange between different brain regions. Such dynamic patterns are crucial for an efficient response of the brain to environmental and cognitive demands. We here propose that the collective oscillations in the brain can provide a mechanism to control dyn...
Article
Full-text available
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Fractional-order models describing neuronal dynamics often exhibit better compatibility with diverse neuronal firing patterns that can be observed experimentally. Due to the overarching significance of synchronization in neuronal dynamics, we here study synchronization in multiplex neuronal networks that are composed of fractional-order Hindmarsh–R...
Article
Early detection of ovarian cancer is crucial for a good outlook. Different machine learning methods have already proven useful to that effect, but using many features and samples often yields a complex structure of classifier algorithms. This study investigates the effect of four different manifold learning methods prior to well-known classificatio...
Article
Studies to date on the role of social exclusion in public cooperation have mainly focused on the peer or pool sanctioning types of excluding free-riders from the share of common goods. However, the exclusive behaviors are not necessarily performed by individuals or local organizations but may rather be implemented by a centralized enforcement insti...
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Our core body temperature is held around 37∘\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$37~^\circ$$\end{document}C by an effective internal thermoregulatory system....
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We review the literature on models that try to explain human behavior in social interactions described by normal-form games with monetary payoffs. We start by covering social and moral preferences. We then focus on the growing body of research showing that people react to the language in which actions are described, especially when it activates mor...
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The complexity in the styles of 1200 Byzantine icons painted between 13th and 16th from Greece, Russia and Romania was investigated through the Kolmogorov algorithmic information theory. The aim was to identify specific quantitative patterns which define the key characteristics of the three different painting schools. Our novel approach using the a...
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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic majorly disrupted conventional schooling and many countries maintained educational services through distance education. The duration of school closures in Turkey was longer than most OECD countries, thus Turkey prioritized school reopenings in the 2021-2022 academic year to mitigate possible negative outcomes of c...
Preprint
Full-text available
We review the literature on models that try to explain human behavior in social interactions described by normal-form games with monetary payoffs. We start by covering social and moral preferences. We then focus on the growing body of research showing that people react to the language in which actions are described, especially when it activates mor...
Article
Full-text available
Experts worldwide have constantly been calling for high-quality open-access epidemiological data, given the fast-evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Disaggregated high-level granularity records are still scant despite being essential to corroborate the effectiveness of virus containment measures and even vaccination strategies. We provide a c...
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This paper studies the synchronization of a network with linear diffusive coupling, which blinks between the variables periodically. The synchronization of the blinking network in the case of sufficiently fast blinking is analyzed by showing that the stability of the synchronous solution depends only on the averaged coupling and not on the instanta...
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Network segregation – a critical problem in real-life networks – can reveal the emergence of conﬂicts or signal an impending collapse of the whole system. However, the strong heterogeneity of such networks and the various deﬁnitions for key nodes continue to pose challenges that limit our ability to foresee segregation and to determine the main dri...
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Rate chaos is a collective state of a neural network characterized by slow irregular fluctuations of firing rates of individual neurons. We study a sparsely connected network of spiking neurons which demonstrates three different scenarios for the emergence of rate chaos, based either on increasing the synaptic strength, increasing the synaptic inte...
Article
Simplicial complexes describe the simple fact that in social networks a link can connect more than two individuals. As we show here, this has far-reaching consequences for epidemic spreading, in particular in the context of a multilayer network model, where one layer is a virtual social network and the other one is a physical contact network. The s...
Article
Many simple natural phenomena are characterized by complex motion that appears random at first glance, but that often displays underlying patterns and behavior that can be clustered in groups. The movement of small pieces of paper falling through the air is one of these systems whose complete mathematical description seems unworkable. Understanding...
Preprint
Full-text available
Many simple natural phenomena are characterized by complex motion that appears random at first glance, but that often displays underlying patterns and behavior that can be clustered in groups. The movement of small pieces of paper falling through the air is one of these systems whose complete mathematical description seems unworkable. Understanding...
Article
Full-text available
Corruption crimes demand highly coordinated actions among criminal agents to succeed. But research dedicated to corruption networks is still in its infancy and indeed little is known about the properties of these networks. Here we present a comprehensive investigation of corruption networks related to political scandals in Spain and Brazil over nea...
Preprint
Full-text available
Corruption crimes demand highly coordinated actions among criminal agents to succeed. But research dedicated to corruption networks is still in its infancy and indeed little is known about the properties of these networks. Here we present a comprehensive investigation of corruption networks related to political scandals in Spain and Brazil over nea...
Article
Group selection and network reciprocity are two well-known mechanisms for cooperation. And while they have separately received ample attention for their ability to promote cooperation in social dilemmas, their joint effects in this regard are much less explored. Here we propose a multilayer network model that takes into account that not only indivi...
Chapter
Human activities often require simultaneous decision-making of individuals in groups. These processes cannot be coherently addressed by means of networks, as networks only allow for pairwise interactions. Here, we propose a general implementation for collective games in which higher-order interactions are encoded on hypergraphs. We employ it for th...
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Many countries worldwide rely on tourism for their economic well-being and development. But with issues such as over-tourism and environmental degradation looming large, there is a pressing need to determine a way forward in a sustainable and mutually rewarding manner. With this motivation, we here propose an asymmetric evolutionary game with mobil...
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Swarmalators are entities with the simultaneous presence of swarming and synchronization that reveal emergent collective behavior due to the fascinating bidirectional interplay between phase and spatial dynamics. Although different coupling topologies have already been considered, here we introduce time-varying competitive phase interaction among s...
Preprint
Full-text available
Network science has evolved into an indispensable platform for studying complex systems. But recent research has identified limits of classical networks, where links connect pairs of nodes, to comprehensively describe group interactions. Higher-order networks, where a link can connect more than two nodes, have therefore emerged as a new frontier in...
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Uncertainties are ubiquitous in everyday life, and it is thus important to explore their effects on the evolution of cooperation. In this paper, the prisoner’s dilemma game with reinforcement learning subject to Lévy noise is studied. Specifically, diverse fluctuations mimicked by Lévy distributed noise are reflected in the payoff matrix of each pl...
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The introduction of COVID-19 vaccination passes (VPs) by many countries coincided with the Delta variant fast becoming dominant across Europe. A thorough assessment of their impact on epidemic dynamics is still lacking. Here, we propose the VAP-SIRS model that considers possibly lower restrictions for the VP holders than for the rest of the populat...
Article
Numerous social problems can be directly related to poverty, and its elimination is thus often declared a grand challenge in modern human societies. Nevertheless, it is difficult to shake the belief that certain fractions of the population would like to see it maintained to ensure the availability of cheap workforce and its readiness to do the hard...
Article
Network science has evolved into an indispensable platform for studying complex systems. But recent research has identified limits of classical networks, where links connect pairs of nodes, to comprehensively describe group interactions. Higher-order networks, where a link can connect more than two nodes, have therefore emerged as a new frontier in...
Article
Full-text available
Technological advances in imaging techniques and biometric data acquisition have enabled us to apply methods of network science to study the morphology and structural design of organelles, organs, and tissues, as well as the coordinated interactions among them that yield a healthy physiology at the level of whole organisms. We here review research...
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In the summer of 2021, European governments removed most NPIs after experiencing prolonged second and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most countries failed to achieve immunization rates high enough to avoid resurgence of the virus. Public health strategies for autumn and winter 2021 have ranged from countries aiming at low incidence by re-int...
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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that, in addition to inattention, excessive activity, or impulsivity, makes it difficult for children to process facial emotions and thus to interact with their peers. Here we analyze neuronal networks of children with this disorder by means of the phase-locking...
Article
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from other disciplines taking from physics the methods that have proven so successful throughout the 19th and the 20th...
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Dialogues among politicians provide a window into political landscapes and relations among parties and nations. Existing research has focused on the outcomes of such dialogues and on the structure of social networks on which they take place. Little is known, however, about how political discussion networks form and which are the main driving forces...
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Higher-order interactions might play a significant role in the collective dynamics of the brain. With this motivation, we here consider a simplicial complex of neurons, in particular, studying the effects of pairwise and three-body interactions on the emergence of synchronization. We assume pairwise interactions to be mediated through electrical sy...
Preprint
Machine learning methods are becoming increasingly important for the development of materials science. In spite of this, the use of image analysis in the development of these systems is still recent and underexplored, especially in materials often studied via optical imaging techniques such as liquid crystals. Here we apply the recently proposed me...
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In a non-sustainable, "over-populated" world, what might the use of nanotechnology-based targeted, autonomous weapons mean for the future of humanity? In order to gain some insights, we make a simplified game-theoretical thought experiment. We consider a population where agents play the public goods game, and where in parallel an epidemic unfolds....
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Full-text available
Swarmalators are entities with the simultaneous presence of swarming and synchronization that reveal emergent collective behavior due to the fascinating bidirectional interplay between phase and spatial dynamics. Although different coupling topologies have already been considered, here we introduce time-varying competitive phase interaction among s...
Article
Machine learning methods are becoming increasingly important for the development of materials science. In spite of this, the use of image analysis in the development of these systems is still recent and underexplored, especially in materials often studied via optical imaging techniques such as liquid crystals. Here we apply the recently proposed me...
Article
With the rapid development of the scale of distributed energy resources, the implementation of distributed algorithms imposes ever-increasing requirements on communication resources. With the aim of reducing the communication burden required to solve the economic dispatch problem, we here consider three key aspects, namely the amount of information...
Article
We give evidence that a population of pure contrarian globally coupled D-dimensional Kuramoto oscillators reaches a collective synchronous state when the interplay between the units goes beyond the limit of pairwise interactions. Namely, we will show that the presence of higher-order interactions may induce the appearance of a coherent state even w...
Preprint
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There is an inconsistency between theory and observations with regards to the contributions of strong and weak players to the public goods. Theory suggests that contributors are either strong players in asymmetric games or cooperative players in symmetric games, but experiments indicate that the weak players in asymmetric systems also contribute to...
Article
We study the evolution of cooperation in 2×2 social dilemma games in which players are located on a two-dimensional square lattice. During the evolution, each player modifies her strategy by means of myopic update dynamic to maximize her payoff while composing neighborhoods of different sizes, which are characterized by the corresponding radius, r....
Article
Sender-receiver games are simple models of information transmission that provide a formalism to study the evolution of honest signaling and deception between a sender and a receiver. In many practical scenarios, lies often affect groups of receivers, which inevitably entangles the payoffs of individuals to the payoffs of other agents in their group...
Preprint
Full-text available
Sender-receiver games are simple models of information transmission that provide a formalism to study the evolution of honest signaling and deception between a sender and a receiver. In many practical scenarios, lies often affect groups of receivers, which inevitably entangles the payoffs of individuals to the payoffs of other agents in their group...
Article
Full-text available
Air travel has been one of the hardest hit industries of COVID-19, with many flight cancellations and airport closures as a consequence. By analysing structural characteristics of the Official Aviation Guide flight data, we show that this resulted in an increased average distance between airports, and in an increased number of long-range routes. Ba...
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Pursuing vaccinations against COVID-19 brings hope to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and remains the most rational decision under pandemic conditions. However, it does not come without challenges, including temporary shortages in vaccine doses, significant vaccine inequity, and questions regarding the durability of vaccine-induced immunity that rem...
Article
In this study, we aimed to detect paroxysmal atrial fibrillation episodes before they occur so that patients can take precautions before putting their and others’ lives in potentially life-threatening danger. We used the atrial fibrillation prediction database, open data from PhysioNet, and assembled our process based on convolutional neural networ...
Article
There are multiple types of interactions among neurons, each of which has a remarkable effect on the neurons' behavior. Due to the significance of chimeras in neural processes, in this paper, we study the impact of different electrical, chemical, and ephaptic couplings on the emergence of chimera. Consequently, a multi-weighted small-world network...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics-inspired or physics-like methods in attempts to resolve diverse societal problems. Such a rise is driven both by physicists venturing outside of their traditional domain of interest, but also by scientists from other domains who wish to mimic the enormous success of physics throughout the 19th a...
Article
Over the past two decades, epidemic spreading on complex network has been a vibrant and highly successful research avenue. The dynamics of epidemic spreading on signed networks has nonetheless received fairly little attention. Signed networks contain edges that are labeled as either positive or negative, in relation to their propensity to either ac...