Characterizing the effect of network structure on evolutionary dynamics via a novel measure of structural heterogeneity

Recently, the study of evolutionary dynamics on structured population has attracted an increasing attention in various fields. This paper aims at investigating the effect of network structure on evolutionary dynamics. In detail, a novel measure of structural heterogeneity is introduced to characterize the network structure effect on evolutionary dynamics. By simulating the evolutionary dynamics of invasion process on a massive amount of randomly sampled networks, we find that structural heterogeneity amplifies the selective effect on fixation probability of invader in birth-death process, however, it weakens the selective effect in death-birth process. These findings provide a fundamental principle for designing selection amplifier, which benefits advantageous invaders while inhibits unadvantageous ones. Moreover, an effective algorithm is proposed to generate selection amplifiers with specified size and average degree.