Eur. Phys. J. B 79, 7-11 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-10635-5

Prediction of extreme events in the OFC model on a small world network

¹ Institut für Theoretische Physik, Albert-Einstein-Allee 11, Universität Ulm, 89069 Ulm, Germany
² QOLS, The Blackett Laboratory, Prince Consort Road, Imperial College, London, SW7 2BW, UK
³ Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Str. 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany

Corresponding author: ^a filippo.caruso@uni-ulm.de

Received: 28 April 2010
Revised: 18 August 2010
Published online: 6 December 2010

Abstract

We investigate the predictability of extreme events in a dissipative Olami-Feder-Christensen model on a small world topology. Due to the mechanism of self-organized criticality, it is impossible to predict the magnitude of the next event knowing previous ones, if the system has an infinite size. However, by exploiting the finite size effects, we show that probabilistic predictions of the occurrence of extreme events in the next time step are possible in a finite system. In particular, the finiteness of the system unavoidably leads to repulsive temporal correlations of extreme events. The predictability of those is higher for larger magnitudes and for larger complex network sizes. Finally, we show that our prediction analysis is also robust by remarkably reducing the accessible number of events used to construct the optimal predictor.