Predicting percolation thresholds in networks.

We consider different methods, which do not rely on numerical simulations of the percolation process, to approximate percolation thresholds in networks. We perform a systematic analysis on synthetic graphs and a collection of 109 real networks to quantify their effectiveness and reliability as prediction tools. Our study reveals that the inverse of the largest eigenvalue of the nonbacktracking matrix of the graph often provides a tight lower bound for true percolation threshold. However, in more than 40% of the cases, this indicator is less predictive than the naive expectation value based solely on the moments of the degree distribution. We find that the performance of all indicators becomes worse as the value of the true percolation threshold grows. Thus, none of them represents a good proxy for the robustness of extremely fragile networks.