Early warning signals for critical transitions in complex systems

Abstract

Not all types of change are slow and gradual. Some changes are sudden and abrupt. Many of these sudden changes can also be catastrophic. Therefore, it is important to be on the lookout for early warning signals, which arise universally in complex systems. To date, a lot is known about early warning signals theoretically, in particular the increasing variance, skewness and kurtosis of high-frequency time series data, and these have been tested in numerous real-world complex systems. However, many questions remain unanswered. Early warning signals present in specific types of complex systems do exist and have been identified, but what if there is a general type of early warning signal that we can then use to apply to systems that have not had specific early warning signals yet? thesis, we focus on the question of what the maximum values of these statistical indicators would be prior to a critical transition. If we know these maximum values, we could predict the time of the critical transition, which is another important question that has yet to be answered.