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Subgroup discovery is a local pattern mining technique to find interpretable descriptions of sub-populations that stand out on a given target variable. That is, these sub-populations are exceptional with regard to the global distribution.…
The Shannon entropy, and related quantities such as mutual information, can be used to quantify uncertainty and relevance. However, in practice, it can be difficult to compute these quantities for arbitrary probability distributions,…
Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often completely…
Community detection helps us simplify the complex configuration of networks, but communities are reliable only if they are statistically significant. To detect statistically significant communities, a common approach is to resample the…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Complex systems research is becomingly increasingly data-driven, particularly in the social and biological domains. Many of the systems from which sample data are collected feature structural heterogeneity at the mesoscopic scale (i.e.…
When randomized ensembles such as bagging or random forests are used for binary classification, the prediction error of the ensemble tends to decrease and stabilize as the number of classifiers increases. However, the precise relationship…
Accurately determining dependency structure is critical to discovering a system's causal organization. We recently showed that the transfer entropy fails in a key aspect of this---measuring information flow---due to its conflation of dyadic…
The relationships between diversity, productivity and scale determine much of the structure and robustness of complex biological and social systems. While arguments for the link between specialization and productivity are common, diversity…
Recognition of pathogens relies on families of proteins showing great diversity. Here we construct maximum entropy models of the sequence repertoire, building on recent experiments that provide a nearly exhaustive sampling of the IgM…
We build a general framework which establishes a one-to-one correspondence between species abundance distribution (SAD) and species accumulation curve (SAC). The appearance rates of the species and the appearance times of individuals of…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
In this chapter, a statistical measure of complexity and the Fisher-Shannon information product are introduced and their properties are discussed. These measures are based on the interplay between the Shannon information, or a function of…
The statistical problem of using an initial sample to estimate the number of species in a larger sample has found important applications in fields far removed from ecology. Here we address the general problem of estimating the number of…
Maximum diversity problems arise in many practical settings from facility location to social networks, and constitute an important class of NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. There has been a growing interest in these problems…
Differential abundance analysis is a key component of microbiome studies. Although dozens of methods exist there is currently no consensus on the preferred methods. While the correctness of results in differential abundance analysis is an…
In this work, the goal is to estimate the abundance of an animal population using data coming from capture-recapture surveys. We leverage the prior knowledge about the population's structure to specify a parsimonious finite mixture model…
Network-based clustering methods frequently require the number of communities to be specified \emph{a priori}. Moreover, most of the existing methods for estimating the number of communities assume the number of communities to be fixed and…
The problem of Shannon entropy estimation in countable infinite alphabets is addressed from the study and use of convergence results of the entropy functional, which is known to be discontinuous with respect to the total variation distance…