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To study population dynamics, ecologists and wildlife biologists use relative abundance data, which are often subject to temporal preferential sampling. Temporal preferential sampling occurs when sampling effort varies across time. To…
A world model matters to an agent only through the state it constructs. That state must preserve some information, discard other information, and support some future function: prediction, control, planning, memory, grounding, or…
Why are large, complex ecosystems stable? Both theory and simulations of current models predict the onset of instability with growing size and complexity, so for decades it has been conjectured that ecosystems must have some unidentified…
Deterministic compartmental models have been used extensively in modeling epidemic propagation. These models are required to fit available data and numerical procedures are often implemented to this end. But not every model architecture is…
Many climate subsystems are thought to be susceptible to tipping - and some might be close to a tipping point. The general belief and intuition, based on simple conceptual models of tipping elements, is that tipping leads to reorganization…
Given a public transportation network of stations and connections, we want to find a minimum subset of stations such that each connection runs through a selected station. Although this problem is NP-hard in general, real-world instances are…
This chapter is about Complexity and Spatial Dynamics in Urban Systems. Strong inequalities in the size of cities and the apparent difficulty of limiting their growth raise practical issues for spatial planning. At a time when new…
Urban transportation systems are vulnerable to congestion, accidents, weather, special events, and other costly delays. Whereas typical policy responses prioritize reduction of delays under normal conditions to improve the efficiency of…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
With a toppling rule which generates metastable sites, we explore the properties of a gradient-driven sandpile that is minimally perturbed at one boundary. In two dimensions we find that the transport of grains takes place along deep…
The recent financial crisis of 2008 and the 2011 indebtedness of Greece highlight the importance of understanding the structure of the global financial network. In this paper we set out to analyze and characterize this network, as captured…
Gravity is one of the most prominent models used across various social areas, including economics, demography, mobility, politics, and other systems where spatial interactions are relevant. The model represents a flexible approach that…
Empirical modelling often aims for the simplest model consistent with the data. A new technique is presented which quantifies the consistency of the model dynamics as a function of location in state space. As is well-known, traditional…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
Urban systems are composed by complex couplings of several components, and more particularly between the built environment and transportation networks. Their interaction is involved in the emergence of the urban form. We propose in this…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
Urban traffic congestion remains a persistent issue for cities worldwide. Recent macroscopic models have adopted a mathematically well-defined relation between network flow and density to characterize traffic states over an urban region.…
The quest for a theory of cities that could offer a quantitative and systematic approach to manage cities is at the top priority, given the challenges humanity faces due to the increasing urbanization and densification of cities. If such a…
It is well understood that the structure of a social network is critical to whether or not agents can aggregate information correctly. In this paper, we study social networks that support information aggregation when rational agents act…
Local decision rules are commonly understood to be more explainable, due to the local nature of the patterns involved. With numerical optimization methods such as gradient boosting, ensembles of local decision rules can gain good predictive…