Large deviations of cascade processes on graphs

Simple models of irreversible dynamical processes such as bootstrap percolation have been successfully applied to describe cascade processes in a large variety of different contexts. However, the problem of analyzing nontypical trajectories, which can be crucial for the understanding of out-of-equilibrium phenomena, is still considered to be intractable in most cases. Here we introduce an efficient method to find and analyze optimized trajectories of cascade processes. We show that for a wide class of irreversible dynamical rules, this problem can be solved efficiently on large-scale systems.