nctpy 1.0.2

Overview

Network Control Theory (NCT) is a branch of physical and engineering sciences that treats a network as a dynamical system. Generally, the system is controlled through control signals that originate at a control node (or control nodes) and move through the network. In the brain, NCT models each region’s activity as a time-dependent internal state that is predicted from a combination of three factors: (i) its previous state, (ii) whole-brain structural connectivity, and (iii) external inputs. NCT enables asking a broad range of questions of a networked system that are highly relevant to network neuroscientists, such as: which regions are positioned such that they can efficiently distribute activity throughout the brain to drive changes in brain states? Do different brain regions control system dynamics in different ways? Given a set of control nodes, how can the system be driven to a specific target state, or switch between a pair of states, by means of internal or external control input?

nctpy is a Python toolbox that provides researchers with a set of tools to conduct some of the common NCT analyses reported in the literature. Below, we list select publications that serve as a primer for these tools and their use cases:

1. Parkes, L., Kim, J. Z., et al. A network control theory pipeline for studying the dynamics of the structural connectome. In press at Nature Protocols (2024). https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.23.554519v1

2. Karrer, T. M., Kim, J. Z., Stiso, J. et al. A practical guide to methodological considerations in the controllability of structural brain networks. Journal of Neural Engineering (2020). https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ab6e8b

3. Kim, J. Z., & Bassett, D. S. Linear dynamics & control of brain networks. arXiv (2019). https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03309

Requirements

Currently, nctpy works with Python 3.9 and requires the following core dependencies:

• numpy (tested on 1.23.4)

• scipy (tested on 1.9.3)

• tqdm (tested on 4.64.1)

The utils module also requires:

• statsmodels (tested on 0.13.2)

The plotting module also requires:

• seaborn (tested on 0.12.0)

• nibabel (tested on 4.0.2)

• nilearn (tested on 0.9.2)

There are some additional (optional) dependencies you can install (note, these are only used for i/o and plotting in the Python notebooks located in the scripts directory):

• pandas (tested on 1.5.1)

• matplotlib (tested on 3.5.3)

• jupyterlab (tested on 3.4.4)

• sklearn (tested on 0.0.post1)

If you want to install the environment that was used to run the analyses presented in the manuscript, use the environment.yml file.

Basic installation

Assuming you have Python 3.9 installed, you can install nctpy by opening a terminal and running the following:

pip install nctpy

Questions

If you have any questions, please contact Linden Parkes and Jason Kim: info@parkeslab.com.