Fitness model (network theory)
In complex network theory, the fitness model is a model of the evolution of a network: how the links between nodes change over time depends on the fitness of nodes. Fitter nodes attract more links at the expense of less fit nodes.
It has been used to model the network structure of the World Wide Web.
The model is based on the idea of fitness, an inherent competitive factor that nodes may have, capable of affecting the network's evolution. According to this idea, the nodes' intrinsic ability to attract links in the network varies from node to node, the most efficient (or "fit") being able to gather more edges in the expense of others. In that sense, not all nodes are identical to each other, and they claim their degree increase according to the fitness they possess every time. The fitness factors of all the nodes composing the network may form a distribution ρ(η) characteristic of the system been studied.
Bianconi and Barabási proposed a new model called Bianconi-Barabasi model, a variant to the Barabási-Albert model (BA model), where the probability for a node to connect to another one is supplied with a term expressing the fitness of the node involved. The fitness parameter is time independent and is multiplicative to the probability
Thus, the system of equations for the time evolution of the degrees according to the continuum theory introduced by the same model will have the form
where m the number of edges the newly coming node has. If we require the solution to have a similar form to the one it had without the insertion of the fitness factors (to avoid ruining the power-law degree distribution of scale-free networks), then the exponent of the solution has to change and become fitness dependent
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