Extreme events in dynamical systems and random walkers: A review

Abstract: Extreme events gain the attention of researchers due to their utmost importance in various contexts ranging from finance to climatology. This brings such recurrent events to the limelight of attention in interdisciplinary research. A comprehensive review of recent progress is provided to capture recent improvements in analyzing such very high-amplitude events from the point of view of dynamical systems and random walkers. We emphasize, in detail, the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of such events in complex systems. Several mechanisms that contribute to the occurrence of extreme events have been elaborated that investigate the sources of instabilities leading to them. In addition, we discuss the prediction of extreme events from two different contexts, using dynamical instabilities and data-based machine learning algorithms. Tracking of instabilities in the phase space is not always feasible and precise knowledge of the dynamics of extreme events does not necessarily help in forecasting extreme events. Moreover, in most studies on high-dimensional systems, only a few degrees of freedom participate in extreme events' formation. Thus, the notable inclusion of prediction through machine learning is of enormous significance, particularly for those cases where the governing equations of the model are explicitly unavailable. Besides, random walks on complex networks can represent several transport processes, and exceedances of the flux of walkers above a prescribed threshold may describe extreme events. We unveil the theoretical studies on random walkers with their enormous potential for applications in reducing extreme events. We cover the possible controlling strategies, which may be helpful to mitigate extreme events in physical situations like traffic jams, heavy load of web requests, competition for shared resources, floods in the network of rivers, and many more.