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Pairwise interactions between perturbations to a system can provide evidence for the causal dependencies of the underlying underlying mechanisms of a system. When observations are low dimensional, hand crafted measurements, detecting…
In the growth of bacterial colonies, a great variety of complex patterns are observed in experiments, depending on external conditions and the bacterial species. Typically, existing models employ systems of reaction-diffusion equations or…
Many scientific fields, including human gut microbiome science, collect multivariate count data where the sum of the counts is unrelated to the scale of the underlying system being measured (e.g., total microbial load in a subject's colon).…
We present a proof-of-concept of a model comparison approach for analyzing spatio-temporal observations of interacting populations. Our model variants are a collection of structurally similar Bayesian networks. Their distinct Noisy-Or…
We present a new method based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA) for detecting associations between one or more scalar covariates and a longitudinal response, while correcting for other variables. Our methods exploit the temporal structure…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…
Non-motile active matter exhibits a wide range of non-equilibrium collective phenomena yet examples are crucially lacking in the literature. We present a microscopic model inspired by the bacteria {\it Neisseria Meningitidis} in which…
We study causal inference in randomized experiments (or quasi-experiments) following a $2\times 2$ factorial design. There are two treatments, denoted $A$ and $B$, and units are randomly assigned to one of four categories: treatment $A$…
Recent studies show that the microbial communities inhabiting the human intestine can have profound impact on our well-being and health. However, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms that control this complex ecosystem. Based on…
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), including Crohn's Disease (CD) and Ulcerative Colitis (UC), presents significant public health challenges due to its complex etiology. Motivated by the IBD study of the Integrative Human Microbiome Project,…
An important task in microbiome studies is to test the existence of and give characterization to differences in the microbiome composition across groups of samples. Important challenges of this problem include the large within-group…
The human microbiome can contribute to pathogeneses of many complex diseases by mediating disease-leading causal pathways. However, standard mediation analysis methods are not adequate to analyze the microbiome as a mediator due to the…
Spurious correlations are a threat to the trustworthiness of natural language processing systems, motivating research into methods for identifying and eliminating them. However, addressing the problem of spurious correlations requires more…
Recent advances in bioinformatics have made high-throughput microbiome data widely available, and new statistical tools are required to maximize the information gained from these data. For example, analysis of high-dimensional microbiome…
We suggest a novel approach to treating symbiotic relations between biological species or social entities. The main idea is the characterisation of symbiotic relations of coexisting species through their mutual influence on their respective…
Determining the Fourier representation of various molecular interactions is important for constructing density-based field theories from a microscopic point of view, enabling a multiscale bridge between microscopic and mesoscopic…
Inferring causal effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to treatment. Observational studies in infectious disease research present the additional challenge that one participant's treatment…
Additive models enjoy the flexibility of nonlinear models while still being readily understandable to humans. By contrast, other nonlinear models, which involve interactions between features, are not only harder to fit but also…
Spurious correlations occur when a model learns unreliable features from the data and are a well-known drawback of data-driven learning. Although there are several algorithms proposed to mitigate it, we are yet to jointly derive the…
Host-to-host variability with respect to interactions between microorganisms and multicellular hosts are commonly observed in infection and in homeostasis. However, the majority of mechanistic models used in analyzing host-microorganism…