Related papers: Maximizing diversity in biology and beyond
In the area of evolutionary computation the calculation of diverse sets of high-quality solutions to a given optimization problem has gained momentum in recent years under the term evolutionary diversity optimization. Theoretical insights…
Entropy and relative or cross entropy measures are two very fundamental concepts in information theory and are also widely used for statistical inference across disciplines. The related optimization problems, in particular the maximization…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
The participation coefficient is a widely used metric of the diversity of a node's connections with respect to a modular partition of a network. An information-theoretic formulation of this concept of connection diversity, referred to here…
In extreme values theory, for a sufficiently large block size, the maxima distribution is approximated by the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. The GEV distribution is a family of continuous probability distributions, which has…
Tsallis' non-extensive entropy is extended to incorporate the dependence on affinities between the microstates of a system. At the core of our construction of the extended entropy ($\mathcal{H}$) is the concept of the effective number of…
Importance sampling of target probability distributions belonging to a given convex class is considered. Motivated by previous results, the cost of importance sampling is quantified using the relative entropy of the target with respect to…
A novel, non-trivial, probabilistic upper bound on the entropy of an unknown one-dimensional distribution, given the support of the distribution and a sample from that distribution, is presented. No knowledge beyond the support of the…
Observational entropy -- a quantity that unifies Boltzmann's entropy, Gibbs' entropy, von Neumann's macroscopic entropy, and the diagonal entropy -- has recently been argued to play a key role in a modern formulation of statistical…
The theory of magnitude provides a mathematical framework for quantifying and maximizing diversity. We apply this framework to formulate quality-diversity algorithms in generic dissimilarity spaces. In particular, we instantiate and…
Whether or not biodiversity dynamics tend toward stable equilibria remains an unsolved question in ecology and evolution with important implications for our understanding of diversity and its conservation. Phylo/population genetic models…
We study the continuity of the maximum-entropy inference map for two observables in finite dimensions. We prove that the continuity is equivalent to the strong continuity of the set-valued inverse numerical range map. This gives a…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…
The relaxed maximum entropy problem is concerned with finding a probability distribution on a finite set that minimizes the relative entropy to a given prior distribution, while satisfying relaxed max-norm constraints with respect to a…
We study the problem of maximizing a spectral risk measure of a given output function which depends on several underlying variables, whose individual distributions are known but whose joint distribution is not. We establish and exploit an…
This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for complex-valued probability measures and explores their novel applications in information theory and statistical analysis. We define a complex probability measure as a phase-modulated…
In this paper we study the distribution of the size of the value set for a random polynomial with degree at most $q-1$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. We obtain the exact probability distribution and show that the number of missing…
Herding is a deterministic algorithm used to generate data points that can be regarded as random samples satisfying input moment conditions. The algorithm is based on the complex behavior of a high-dimensional dynamical system and is…
Measuring diversity accurately is important for many scientific fields, including machine learning (ML), ecology, and chemistry. The Vendi Score was introduced as a generic similarity-based diversity metric that extends the Hill number of…
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…