An accurate mean-field equation for voter model dynamics on scale-free networks
Marvin Lücke, Stefanie Winkelmann, Péter Koltai
Published: 2025/9/16
Abstract
Understanding the emergent macroscopic behavior of dynamical systems on networks is a crucial but challenging task. One of the simplest and most effective methods to construct a reduced macroscopic model is given by mean-field theory. The resulting approximations perform well on dense and homogeneous networks but poorly on scale-free networks, which, however, are more realistic in many applications. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of the mean-field approximation for voter model dynamics on scale-free networks. This approach achieves a significantly smaller approximation error than standard methods without increasing dimensionality.