Fig 7. Information transfer of assortative networks.

(Top row) Mutual information I = H − H _noise of the input/output relation is optimized for intermediate assortativity. (Bottom row) Response variability H (stars) and noise entropy H _noise (open symbols). Network output is quantified by the average firing rate of n randomly chosen neurons. (A) Numerical simulations of networks with N = 10⁵ neurons and (B) calculations with the population-density approach, where N _kk′ is sampled from the adjacency matrices of the correlated networks.