In phase-transition phenomena, the estimation of the critical point is crucial for the calculation of the various critical exponents and the determination of the universality class they belong to. However, this is not an easy task, since a large amount of realizations is needed to eliminate the noise in the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for the simultaneous estimation of the critical point $p_c$ and the critical exponent $\beta /\nu$, applied for the case of “explosive” bond percolation on two-dimensional square lattices and Erdös-Rényi networks. The results show that with only a few hundred realizations, it is possible to acquire accurate values for these quantities. Guidelines are given at the end for the applicability of the method to other cases as well.

• Received 9 September 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.062101