The robustness of network backbones in response to noise contamination.

<p>The noise effect was introduced into 450 simulated network time series in two ways: increasing the random rewiring ratio (from 1% to 20%) for each network and increasing the period of random rewiring (from 0.025% to 75%) for the sequential networks. Dotted lines indicate the standard deviation of tests. Each series has 4,000 sequential networks. Each network has 6 nodes and about 9.5 links on average. About 70% of the network backbones were preserved with the random rewiring ratio of up to 20%. However, the period of random rewiring more significantly affected the original configuration of network backbones. Each color corresponds to the period of noise contamination. The error bar indicates the standard deviation over the 450 simulated network time series.