Coupling strength versus coupling impact in nonidentical bidirectionally coupled dynamics

The understanding of interacting dynamics is important for the characterization of real-world networks. In general, real-world networks are heterogeneous in the sense that each node of the network is a dynamics with different properties. For coupled nonidentical dynamics symmetric interactions are not straightforwardly defined from the coupling strength values. Thus, a challenging issue is whether we can define a symmetric interaction in this asymmetric setting. To address this problem we introduce the notion of the coupling impact. The coupling impact considers not only the coupling strength but also the energy of the individual dynamics, which is conveyed via the coupling. To illustrate this concept, we follow a data-driven approach by analyzing signals from pairs of coupled model dynamics using two different connectivity measures. We find that the coupling impact, but not the coupling strength, correctly detects a symmetric interaction between pairs of coupled dynamics regardless of their degree of asymmetry. Therefore, this approach allows us to reveal the real impact that one dynamics has on the other and hence to define symmetric interactions in pairs of nonidentical dynamics.