  We characterise the evolution of a dynamical system by combining two
well-known complex systems' tools, namely, symbolic ordinal analysis and
networks. From the ordinal representation of a time-series we construct a
network in which every node weights represents the probability of an ordinal
patterns (OPs) to appear in the symbolic sequence and each edges weight
represents the probability of transitions between two consecutive OPs. Several
network-based diagnostics are then proposed to characterize the dynamics of
different systems: logistic, tent and circle maps. We show that these
diagnostics are able to capture changes produced in the dynamics as a control
parameter is varied. We also apply our new measures to empirical data from
semiconductor lasers and show that they are able to anticipate the polarization
switchings, thus providing early warning signals of abrupt transitions.
