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We report the spectroscopic confirmation and fundamental properties of TOI-757 b, a mini-Neptune on a 17.5-day orbit transiting a bright star ($V = 9.7$ mag) discovered by the TESS mission. We acquired high-precision radial velocity measurements with the HARPS, ESPRESSO, and PFS spectrographs to confirm the planet detection and determine its mass. We also acquired space-borne transit photometry with the CHEOPS space telescope to place stronger constraints on the planet radius, supported with ground-based LCOGT photometry. WASP and KELT photometry were used to help constrain the stellar rotation period. We also determined the fundamental parameters of the host star. We find that TOI-757 b has a radius of $R_{\mathrm{p}} = 2.5 \pm 0.1 R_{\oplus}$ and a mass of $M_{\mathrm{p}} = 10.5^{+2.2}_{-2.1} M_{\oplus}$, implying a bulk density of $\rho_{\text{p}} = 3.6 \pm 0.8$ g cm$^{-3}$. Our internal composition modeling was unable to constrain the composition of TOI-757 b, highlighting the importance of atmospheric observations for the system. We also find the planet to be highly eccentric with $e$ = 0.39$^{+0.08}_{-0.07}$, making it one of the very few highly eccentric planets among precisely characterized mini-Neptunes. Based on comparisons to other similar eccentric systems, we find a likely scenario for TOI-757 b's formation to be high eccentricity migration due to a distant outer companion. We additionally propose the possibility of a more intrinsic explanation for the high eccentricity due to star-star interactions during the earlier epoch of the Galactic disk formation, given the low metallicity and older age of TOI-757., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS; 26 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables

We aim to constrain the internal structure and composition of HD 15337 b and c, two short-period planets situated on opposite sides of the radius valley, using new transit photometry and radial velocity data. We acquire 6 new transit visits with the CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) and 32 new radial velocity measurements from the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) to improve the accuracy of the mass and radius estimates for both planets. We reanalyse light curves from TESS sectors 3 and 4 and analyse new data from sector 30, correcting for long-term stellar activity. Subsequently, we perform a joint fit of the TESS and CHEOPS light curves, and all available RV data from HARPS and the Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS). Our model fits the planetary signals, the stellar activity signal and the instrumental decorrelation model for the CHEOPS data simultaneously. The stellar activity was modelled using a Gaussian-process regression on both the RV and activity indicators. We finally employ a Bayesian retrieval code to determine the internal composition and structure of the planets. We derive updated and highly precise parameters for the HD 15337 system. Our improved precision on the planetary parameters makes HD 15337 b one of the most precisely characterised rocky exoplanets, with radius and mass measurements achieving a precision better than 2\% and 7\%, respectively. We are able to improve the precision of the radius measurement of HD 15337 c to 3\%. Our results imply that the composition of HD 15337 b is predominantly rocky, while HD 15337 c exhibits a gas envelope with a mass of at least $0.01\ M_\oplus$.Our results lay the groundwork for future studies, which can further unravel the atmospheric evolution of these exoplanets and give new insights into their composition and formation history and the causes behind the radius gap., Comment: 17 pages, including appendix

We investigate block diagonal and hierarchical nested stochastic multivariate Gaussian models by studying their sample cross-correlation matrix on high dimensions. By performing numerical simulations, we compare a filtered sample cross-correlation with the population cross-correlation matrices by using several rotationally invariant estimators (RIE) and hierarchical clustering estimators (HCE) under several loss functions. We show that at large but finite sample size, sample cross-correlation filtered by RIE estimators are often outperformed by HCE estimators for several of the loss functions. We also show that for block models and for hierarchically nested block models the best determination of the filtered sample cross-correlation is achieved by introducing two-step estimators combining state-of-the-art non-linear shrinkage models with hierarchical clustering estimators., Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables

Tidal orbital decay is suspected to occur especially for hot Jupiters, with the only observationally confirmed case of this being WASP-12 b. By examining this effect, information on the properties of the host star can be obtained using the so-called stellar modified tidal quality factor $Q_*'$, which describes the efficiency with which kinetic energy of the planet is dissipated within the star. This can help to get information about the interior of the star. In this study, we aim to improve constraints on the tidal decay of the KELT-9, KELT-16 and WASP-4 systems, to find evidence for or against the presence of this particular effect. With this, we want to constrain each star's respective $Q_*'$ value. In addition to that, we also aim to test the existence of the transit timing variations (TTVs) in the HD 97658 system, which previously favoured a quadratic trend with increasing orbital period. Making use of newly acquired photometric observations from CHEOPS and TESS, combined with archival transit and occultation data, we use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to fit three models, a constant period model, an orbital decay model, and an apsidal precession model, to the data. We find that the KELT-9 system is best described by an apsidal precession model for now, with an orbital decay trend at over 2 $\sigma$ being a possible solution as well. A Keplerian orbit model with a constant orbital period fits the transit timings of KELT-16 b the best due to the scatter and scale of their error bars. The WASP-4 system is represented the best by an orbital decay model at a 5 $\sigma$ significance, although apsidal precession cannot be ruled out with the present data. For HD 97658 b, using recently acquired transit observations, we find no conclusive evidence for a previously suspected strong quadratic trend in the data., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, 9 tables, accepted for publication in A&A

A tidal interaction between a star and a close-in exoplanet leads to shrinkage of the planetary orbit and eventual tidal disruption of the planet. Measuring the shrinkage of the orbits will allow for the tidal quality parameter of the star ($Q'_\star$) to be measured, which is an important parameter to obtain information about stellar interiors. We analyse data from TESS for two targets known to host close-in hot Jupiters, WASP-18 and WASP-19, to measure the current limits on orbital period variation and provide new constrains on $Q'_\star$. We modelled the transit shape using all the available TESS observations and fitted the individual transit times of each transit. We used previously published transit times together with our results to fit two models, a constant period model, and a quadratic orbital decay model, MCMC algorithms. We find period change rates of $(-0.11\pm0.21)\times10^{-10}$ for WASP-18b and $(-0.35\pm0.22)\times10^{-10}$ for WASP-19b and we do not find significant evidence of orbital decay in these targets. We obtain new lower limits for $Q'_\star$ of $(1.42\pm0.34)\times10^7$ in WASP-18 and $(1.26\pm0.10)\times10^6$ in WASP-19, corresponding to upper limits of the orbital decay rate of $-0.45\times10^{-10}$ and $-0.71\times10^{-10}$, respectively, with a 95% confidence level. We compare our results with other relevant targets for tidal decay studies. We find that the orbital decay rate in both WASP-18b and WASP-19b appears to be smaller than the measured orbital decay of WASP-12b. We show that the minimum value of $Q'_\star$ in WASP-18 is two orders of magnitude higher than that of WASP-12, while WASP-19 has a minimum value one order of magnitude higher, which is consistent with other similar targets. Further observations are required to constrain the orbital decay of WASP-18 and WASP-19., Comment: 10 pages plus 5-page appendix. To be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics

We introduce a method for the detection of Statistically Validated Simplices in higher-order networks. Statistically validated simplices represent the maximal sets of nodes of any size that consistently interact collectively and do not include co-interacting nodes that appears only occasionally. Using properly designed higher-order benchmarks, we show that our approach is highly effective in systems where the maximal sets are likely to be diluted into interactions of larger sizes that include occasional participants. By applying our method to two real world datasets, we also show how it allows to detect simplices whose nodes are characterized by significant levels of similarity, providing new insights on the generative processes of real world higher-order networks., Comment: presubmission version, 10 pages and 5 figures

Online platforms experience a tension between decentralisation and incentives to steer user behaviour, which are usually implemented through digital reputation systems. We provide a statistical characterisation of the user behaviour emerging from the interplay of such competing forces in Stack Overflow, a long-standing knowledge sharing platform. Over the 11 years covered by our analysis, we find that the platform's user base consistently self-organise into specialists and generalists, i.e., users who focus their activity on narrow and broad sets of topics, respectively. We relate the emergence of these behaviours to the platform's reputation system with a series of data-driven models, and find specialisation to be statistically associated with a higher ability to post the best answers to a question. Our findings are in stark contrast with observations made in top-down environments - such as firms and corporations - where generalist skills are consistently found to be more successful.

Recent empirical evidence has shown that in many real-world systems, successfully represented as networks, interactions are not limited to dyads, but often involve three or more agents at a time. These data are better described by hypergraphs, where hyperlinks encode higher-order interactions among a group of nodes. In spite of the large number of works on networks, highlighting informative hyperlinks in hypergraphs obtained from real world data is still an open problem. Here we propose an analytic approach to filter hypergraphs by identifying those hyperlinks that are over-expressed with respect to a random null hypothesis, and represent the most relevant higher-order connections. We apply our method to a class of synthetic benchmarks and to several datasets. For all cases, the method highlights hyperlinks that are more informative than those extracted with pairwise approaches. Our method provides a first way to obtain statistically validated hypergraphs, separating informative connections from redundant and noisy ones., Comment: pre-submission version, 10 pages and 3 figures + SI

We perform a large scale analysis of a list of fintech terms in (i) news and blogs in English language and (ii) professional descriptions of companies operating in many countries. The occurrence and co-occurrence of fintech terms and locutions shows a progressive evolution of the list of fintech terms in a compact and coherent set of terms used worldwide to describe fintech business activities. By using methods of complex networks that are specifically designed to deal with heterogeneous systems, our analysis of a large set of professional descriptions of companies shows that companies having fintech terms in their description present over-expressions of specific attributes of country, municipality, and economic sector. By using the approach of statistically validated networks, we detect geographical and economic over-expressions of a set of companies related to the multi-industry, geographically and economically distributed fintech movement., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables

We develop a greedy algorithm that is fast and scalable in the detection of a nested partition extracted from a dendrogram obtained from hierarchical clustering of a multivariate series. Our algorithm provides a $p$-value for each clade observed in the hierarchical tree. The $p$-value is obtained by computing a number of bootstrap replicas of the dissimilarity matrix and by performing a statistical test on each difference between the dissimilarity associated with a given clade and the dissimilarity of the clade of its parent node. We prove the efficacy of our algorithm with a set of benchmarks generated by using a hierarchical factor model. We compare the results obtained by our algorithm with those of Pvclust. Pvclust is a widely used algorithm developed with a global approach originally motivated by phylogenetic studies. In our numerical experiments we focus on the role of multiple hypothesis test correction and on the robustness of the algorithms to inaccuracy and errors of datasets. We also apply our algorithm to a reference empirical dataset. We verify that our algorithm is much faster than Pvclust algorithm and has a better scalability both in the number of elements and in the number of records of the investigated multivariate set. Our algorithm provides a hierarchically nested partition in much shorter time than currently widely used algorithms allowing to perform a statistically validated cluster analysis detection in very large systems.

We describe two different bootstrap methods applied to the detection of a minimum spanning tree obtained from a set of multivariate variables. We show that two different bootstrap procedures provide partly distinct information that can be highly informative about the investigated complex system. Our case study, based on the investigation of daily returns of a portfolio of stocks traded in the US equity markets, shows the degree of robustness and completeness of the information extracted with popular information filtering methods such as the minimum spanning tree and the planar maximally filtered graph. The first method performs a "row bootstrap" whereas the second method performs a "pair bootstrap". We show that the parallel use of the two methods is suggested especially for complex systems presenting both a nested hierarchical organization together with the presence of global feedback channels., Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures

We use the information present in a bipartite network to detect cores of communities of each set of the bipartite system. Cores of communities are found by investigating statistically validated projected networks obtained using information present in the bipartite network. Cores of communities are highly informative and robust with respect to the presence of errors or missing entries in the bipartite network. We assess the statistical robustness of cores by investigating an artificial benchmark network, the co-authorship network, and the actor-movie network. The accuracy and precision of the partition obtained with respect to the reference partition are measured in terms of the adjusted Rand index and of the adjusted Wallace index respectively. The detection of cores is highly precise although the accuracy of the methodology can be limited in some cases., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

We present an agent based model of the Air Traffic Management socio-technical complex system that aims at modeling the interactions between aircrafts and air traffic controllers at a tactical level. The core of the model is given by the conflict detection and resolution module and by the directs module. Directs are flight shortcuts that are given by air controllers to speed up the passage of an aircraft within a certain airspace and therefore to facilitate airline operations. Conflicts resolution between flight trajectories can arise during the en-route phase of each flight due to both not detailed flight trajectory planning or unforeseen events that perturb the planned flight plan. Our model performs a local conflict detection and resolution procedure. Once a flight trajectory has been made conflict-free, the model searches for possible improvements of the system efficiency by issuing directs. We give an example of model calibration based on real data. We then provide an illustration of the capability of our model in generating scenario simulations able to give insights about the air traffic management system. We show that the calibrated model is able to reproduce the existence of a geographical localization of air traffic controllers' operations. Finally, we use the model to investigate the relationship between directs and conflict resolutions (i) in the presence of perfect forecast ability of controllers, and (ii) in the presence of some degree of uncertainty in flight trajectory forecast., Comment: 18 pages, 2 tables, 12 figures

We detect the backbone of the weighted bipartite network of the Japanese credit market relationships. The backbone is detected by adapting a general method used in the investigation of weighted networks. With this approach we detect a backbone that is statistically validated against a null hypothesis of uniform diversification of loans for banks and firms. Our investigation is done year by year and it covers more than thirty years during the period from 1980 to 2011. We relate some of our findings with economic events that have characterized the Japanese credit market during the last years. The study of the time evolution of the backbone allows us to detect changes occurred in network size, fraction of credit explained, and attributes characterizing the banks and the firms present in the backbone., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures

We investigate the trading behavior of Finnish individual investors trading the stocks selected to compute the OMXH25 index in 2003 by tracking the individual daily investment decisions. We verify that the set of investors is a highly heterogeneous system under many aspects. We introduce a correlation based method that is able to detect a hierarchical structure of the trading profiles of heterogeneous individual investors. We verify that the detected hierarchical structure is highly overlapping with the cluster structure obtained with the approach of statistically validated networks when an appropriate threshold of the hierarchical trees is used. We also show that the combination of the correlation based method and of the statistically validated method provides a way to expand the information about the clusters of investors with similar trading profiles in a robust and reliable way., Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures

Sicily has played an important role in the development of the new research area named "Econophysics". In fact some key ideas supporting this new hybrid discipline were originally formulated in a pioneering work of the Sicilian born physicist Ettore Majorana. The article he wrote was entitled "The value of statistical laws in physics and social sciences". I will discuss its origin and history that has been recently discovered in the study of Stefano Roncoroni. This recent study documents the true reasons and motivations that triggered the pioneering work of Majorana. It also shows that the description of this work provided by Edoardo Amaldi was shallow and misleading. In the second part of the talk I will recollect the first years of development of econophysics and in particular the role of the "International Workshop on Econophysics and Statistical Finance" held in Palermo on 28-30 September 1998 and the setting in 1999 of the "Observatory of Complex Systems" the research group on Econophysics of Palermo University and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica della Materia., Comment: 4 pages, Proceedings of the XXXIII Congress of the Italian Society for the History of Physics and Astronomy (SISFA 2013 Acireale September 4th-7th 2013)

We present an analysis of the credit market of Japan. The analysis is performed by investigating the bipartite network of banks and firms which is obtained by setting a link between a bank and a firm when a credit relationship is present in a given time window. In our investigation we focus on a community detection algorithm which is identifying communities composed by both banks and firms. We show that the clusters obtained by directly working on the bipartite network carry information about the networked nature of the Japanese credit market. Our analysis is performed for each calendar year during the time period from 1980 to 2011. Specifically, we obtain communities of banks and networks for each of the 32 investigated years, and we introduce a method to track the time evolution of these communities on a statistical basis. We then characterize communities by detecting the simultaneous over-expression of attributes of firms and banks. Specifically, we consider as attributes the economic sector and the geographical location of firms and the type of banks. In our 32 year long analysis we detect a persistence of the over-expression of attributes of clusters of banks and firms together with a slow dynamics of changes from some specific attributes to new ones. Our empirical observations show that the credit market in Japan is a networked market where the type of banks, geographical location of firms and banks and economic sector of the firm play a role in shaping the credit relationships between banks and firms., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 Tables

Big data open up unprecedented opportunities to investigate complex systems including the society. In particular, communication data serve as major sources for computational social sciences but they have to be cleaned and filtered as they may contain spurious information due to recording errors as well as interactions, like commercial and marketing activities, not directly related to the social network. The network constructed from communication data can only be considered as a proxy for the network of social relationships. Here we apply a systematic method, based on multiple hypothesis testing, to statistically validate the links and then construct the corresponding Bonferroni network, generalized to the directed case. We study two large datasets of mobile phone records, one from Europe and the other from China. For both datasets we compare the raw data networks with the corresponding Bonferroni networks and point out significant differences in the structures and in the basic network measures. We show evidence that the Bonferroni network provides a better proxy for the network of social interactions than the original one. By using the filtered networks we investigated the statistics and temporal evolution of small directed 3-motifs and conclude that closed communication triads have a formation time-scale, which is quite fast and typically intraday. We also find that open communication triads preferentially evolve to other open triads with a higher fraction of reciprocated calls. These stylized facts were observed for both datasets., Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables

Interbank markets are fundamental for bank liquidity management. In this paper, we introduce a model of interbank trading with memory. Our model reproduces features of preferential trading patterns in the e-MID market recently empirically observed through the method of statistically validated networks. The memory mechanism is used to introduce a proxy of trust in the model. The key idea is that a lender, having lent many times to a borrower in the past, is more likely to lend to that borrower again in the future than to other borrowers, with which the lender has never (or has in- frequently) interacted. The core of the model depends on only one parameter representing the initial attractiveness of all the banks as borrowers. Model outcomes and real data are compared through a variety of measures that describe the structure and properties of trading networks, including number of statistically validated links, bidirectional links, and 3-motifs. Refinements of the pairing method are also proposed, in order to capture finite memory and reciprocity in the model. The model is implemented within the Mason framework in Java., Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures

Mobile phone calling is one of the most widely used communication methods in modern society. The records of calls among mobile phone users provide us a valuable proxy for the understanding of human communication patterns embedded in social networks. Mobile phone users call each other forming a directed calling network. If only reciprocal calls are considered, we obtain an undirected mutual calling network. The preferential communication behavior between two connected users can be statistically tested and it results in two Bonferroni networks with statistically validated edges. We perform a comparative analysis of the statistical properties of these four networks, which are constructed from the calling records of more than nine million individuals in Shanghai over a period of 110 days. We find that these networks share many common structural properties and also exhibit idiosyncratic features when compared with previously studied large mobile calling networks. The empirical findings provide us an intriguing picture of a representative large social network that might shed new lights on the modelling of large social networks.

According to the leading models in modern finance, the presence of intraday lead-lag relationships between financial assets is negligible in efficient markets. With the advance of technology, however, markets have become more sophisticated. To determine whether this has resulted in an improved market efficiency, we investigate whether statistically significant lagged correlation relationships exist in financial markets. We introduce a numerical method to statistically validate links in correlation-based networks, and employ our method to study lagged correlation networks of equity returns in financial markets. Crucially, our statistical validation of lead-lag relationships accounts for multiple hypothesis testing over all stock pairs. In an analysis of intraday transaction data from the periods 2002--2003 and 2011--2012, we find a striking growth in the networks as we increase the frequency with which we sample returns. We compute how the number of validated links and the magnitude of correlations change with increasing sampling frequency, and compare the results between the two data sets. Finally, we compare topological properties of the directed correlation-based networks from the two periods using the in-degree and out-degree distributions and an analysis of three-node motifs. Our analysis suggests a growth in both the efficiency and instability of financial markets over the past decade.

We investigate the dynamics of correlations present between pairs of industry indices of US stocks traded in US markets by studying correlation based networks and spectral properties of the correlation matrix. The study is performed by using 49 industry index time series computed by K. French and E. Fama during the time period from July 1969 to December 2011 that is spanning more than 40 years. We show that the correlation between industry indices presents both a fast and a slow dynamics. The slow dynamics has a time scale longer than five years showing that a different degree of diversification of the investment is possible in different periods of time. On top to this slow dynamics, we also detect a fast dynamics associated with exogenous or endogenous events. The fast time scale we use is a monthly time scale and the evaluation time period is a 3 month time period. By investigating the correlation dynamics monthly, we are able to detect two examples of fast variations in the first and second eigenvalue of the correlation matrix. The first occurs during the dot-com bubble (from March 1999 to April 2001) and the second occurs during the period of highest impact of the subprime crisis (from August 2008 to August 2009)., Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures