Related papers: Robust estimation of microbial diversity in theory…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…
We quantify a social organization's potentiality, that is its ability to attain different configurations. The organization is represented as a network in which nodes correspond to individuals and (multi-)edges to their multiple…
A marginal problem asks whether a given family of marginal distributions for some set of random variables arises from some joint distribution of these variables. Here we point out that the existence of such a joint distribution imposes…
Shannon Entropy is the preeminent tool for measuring the level of uncertainty (and conversely, information content) in a random variable. In the field of communications, entropy can be used to express the information content of given…
Feature selection is indispensable in microbiome data analysis, but it can be particularly challenging as microbiome data sets are high-dimensional, underdetermined, sparse and compositional. Great efforts have recently been made on…
In 1972, Robert May triggered a worldwide research program studying ecological communities using random matrix theory. Yet, it remains unclear if and when we can treat real communities as random ecosystems. Here, we draw on recent progress…
Convergence properties of Shannon Entropy are studied. In the differential setting, it is shown that weak convergence of probability measures, or convergence in distribution, is not enough for convergence of the associated differential…
Shannon entropy is widely used to measure the complexity of DNA sequences but suffers from saturation effects that limit its discriminative power for long uniform segments. We introduce a novel metric, the entropy rank ratio R, which…
An analytical approximation is derived for the Zero Sum Multinomial distribution which gives the Species Abundance Distribution in Neutral Community Models. The obtained distribution function describes well computer simulation results on…
Distributed systems, such as biological and artificial neural networks, process information via complex interactions engaging multiple subsystems, resulting in high-order patterns with distinct properties across scales. Investigating how…
The search for life in the Solar System hinges on data from planetary missions. Detecting biosignatures based on molecular identity, isotopic composition, or chiral excess requires measurements that current and planned missions can only…
The preservation of soil health is a critical challenge in the 21st century due to its significant impact on agriculture, human health, and biodiversity. We provide the first deep investigation of the predictive potential of machine…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Biodiversity assessments depend critically on the spatial scale at which species richness is measured. How species richness accumulates with sampling area is influenced by natural and anthropogenic processes whose effects vary across…
We consider the problem of estimating fold-changes in the expected value of a multivariate outcome observed with unknown sample-specific and category-specific perturbations. This challenge arises in high-throughput sequencing studies of the…
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
Urban tree biodiversity is critical for climate resilience, ecological stability, and livability in cities, yet most municipalities lack detailed knowledge of their canopies. Field-based inventories provide reliable estimates of Shannon and…
Identifying which taxa in our microbiota are associated with traits of interest is important for advancing science and health. However, the identification is challenging because the measured vector of taxa counts (by amplicon sequencing) is…
The histogram is a key method for visualizing data and estimating the underlying probability distribution. Incorrect conclusions about the data result from over or under-binning. A new method based on the Shannon entropy of the histogram…