Emergent centrality in rank-based supplanting process.

Abstract

We propose a stochastic process of interacting many agents, which is inspired by rank-based supplanting dynamics commonly observed in a group of Japanese macaques. In order to characterize the breaking of permutation symmetry with respect to agents' rank in the stochastic process, we introduce a rank-dependent quantity, overlap centrality, which quantifies how often a given agent overlaps with the other agents. We give a sufficient condition in a wide class of the models such that overlap centrality shows perfect correlation in terms of the agents' rank in the zero-supplanting limit. We also discuss a singularity of the correlation in the case of interaction induced by a Potts energy.