Coarse-grained Monte Carlo simulations of the phase transition of the Potts model on weighted networks.

Developing an effective coarse-grained (CG) approach is a promising way for studying dynamics on large size networks. In the present work, we have proposed a strength-based CG (s-CG) method to study critical phenomena of the Potts model on weighted complex networks. By merging nodes with close strengths together, the original network is reduced to a CG network with much smaller size, on which the CG Hamiltonian can be well defined. In particular, we make an error analysis and show that our s-CG approach satisfies the condition of statistical consistency, which demands that the equilibrium probability distribution of the CG model matches that of the microscopic counterpart. Extensive numerical simulations are performed on scale-free networks and random networks, without or with strength correlation, showing that this s-CG approach works very well in reproducing the phase diagrams, fluctuations, and finite-size effects of the microscopic model, while the d-CG approach proposed in our recent work [Phys. Rev. E 82, 011107 (2010)] does not.