Related papers: The Past and the Future in the Present
The paper addresses the problem of finding the causal direction between two associated variables. The proposed solution is to build an autoencoder of their joint distribution and to maximize its estimation capacity relative to both the…
Randomness in scientific estimation is generally assumed to arise from unmeasured or uncontrolled factors. However, when combining subjective probability estimates, heterogeneity stemming from people's cognitive or information diversity is…
Many regenerative arguments in stochastic processes use random times which are akin to stopping times, but which are determined by the future as well as the past behaviour of the process of interest. Such arguments based on "conditioning on…
What will the future be? We wonder! In this survey, we explore the gap between current research in egocentric vision and the ever-anticipated future, where wearable computing, with outward facing cameras and digital overlays, is expected to…
Recent research has explored the increasingly important role of social media by examining the dynamics of individual and group behavior, characterizing patterns of information diffusion, and identifying influential individuals. In this…
Forecasting tasks surrounding the dynamics of low-level human behavior are of significance to multiple research domains. In such settings, methods for explaining specific forecasts can enable domain experts to gain insights into the…
We describe an approach to improving model fitting and model generalization that considers the entropy of distributions of modelling residuals. We use simple simulations to demonstrate the observational signatures of overfitting on ordered…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
A prediction makes a claim about a system's future given knowledge of its past. A retrodiction makes a claim about its past given knowledge of its future. The bidirectional machine is an ambidextrous hidden Markov chain that does both…
Predicting the future is an important component of decision making. In most situations, however, there is not enough information to make accurate predictions. In this paper, we develop a theory of causal reasoning for predictive inference…
To account for the origin of information accumulation in nature despite the entropy-increase law, we advocate a universal mechanism due to competition/selection of general composite entities, from simple to complex. To confirm its…
The description of the dynamics of complex systems, in particular the capture of the interaction structure and causal relationships between elements of the system, is one of the central questions of interdisciplinary research. While the…
The existence of a global causal order between events places constraints on the correlations that parties may share. Such "causal correlations" have been the focus of recent attention, driven by the realization that some extensions of…
Future sequence represents the outcome after executing the action into the environment (i.e. the trajectory onwards). When driven by the information-theoretic concept of mutual information, it seeks maximally informative consequences.…
The relationship between entropy and information is reviewed, taking into account that information is stored in macroscopic degrees of freedom, such as the order parameter in a system exhibiting spontaneous symmetry breaking. It is shown…
Computers are deterministic dynamical systems (CHAOS 19:033124, 2009). Among other things, that implies that one should be able to use deterministic forecast rules to predict their behavior. That statement is sometimes-but not always-true.…
Given an unknown quantum state distributed over two systems, we determine how much quantum communication is needed to transfer the full state to one system. This communication measures the "partial information" one system needs conditioned…
For the purpose of causal inference we employ a stochastic model of the data generating process, utilizing individual propensity probabilities for the treatment, and also individual and counterfactual prognosis probabilities for the…
We study the problem of predicting the future, though only in the probabilistic sense of estimating a future state of a time-varying probability distribution. This is not only an interesting academic problem, but solving this extrapolation…
Inferring the directionality of interactions between cellular processes is a major challenge in systems biology. Time-lagged correlations allow to discriminate between alternative models, but they still rely on assumed underlying…