Visibility graph analysis for re-sampled time series from auto-regressive stochastic processes

Visibility graph (VG) and horizontal visibility graph (HVG) play a crucial role in modern complex network approaches to nonlinear time series analysis. However, depending on the underlying dynamic processes, it remains to characterize the exponents of presumably exponential degree distributions. It has been recently conjectured that there is a critical value of exponent λ_c=ln3/2, which separates chaotic from correlated stochastic processes. Here, we systematically apply (H)VG analysis to time series from autoregressive (AR) models, which confirms the hypothesis that an increased correlation length results in larger values of λ > λ_c. On the other hand, we numerically find a regime of negatively correlated process increments where λ < λ_c, which is in contrast to this hypothesis. Furthermore, by constructing graphs based on re-sampled time series, we find that network measures show non-trivial dependencies on the autocorrelation functions of the processes. We propose to choose the decorrelation time as the maximal re-sampling delay for the algorithm. Our results are detailed for time series from AR(1) and AR(2) processes.