Related papers: A bare-bones mathematical model of radicalization

Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…

Researchers in psychology characterize decision-making as a process of eliminating options. While statistical modelling typically focuses on the eventual choice, we analyze consideration sets describing, for each survey participant, all…

Attack trees are a popular way to represent and evaluate potential security threats on systems or infrastructures. The goal of this work is to provide a framework allowing to express and check whether an attack tree is consistent with the…

This paper investigates recently proposed approaches for defending against adversarial examples and evaluating adversarial robustness. We motivate 'adversarial risk' as an objective for achieving models robust to worst-case inputs. We then…

Predictive policing has its roots in crime hotspot modeling. In this paper we give an example of what goes into mathematical crime hot spot modeling and show that the modeling assumptions perpetuate systemic racism in policing. The goal of…

We consider the phenomenon of opinion shift to the extreme reported in the social psychology literature. We argue that a good candidate to model this phenomenon can be a new variant of the bounded confidence (BC) model, the smooth BC model…

Epidemic models often reflect characteristic features of infectious spreading processes by coupled non-linear differential equations considering different states of health (such as Susceptible, Infected, or Recovered). This compartmental…

Many models of epidemic spread have a common qualitative structure. The numbers of infected individuals during the initial stages of an epidemic can be well approximated by a branching process, after which the proportion of individuals that…

In criminal justice risk forecasting, one can prove that it is impossible to optimize accuracy and fairness at the same time. One can also prove that it is impossible optimize at once all of the usual group definitions of fairness. In the…

Polarization is a problem in modern society. Understanding how opinions evolve through social interactions is crucial for addressing conditions that lead to polarization, consensus, or opinion diversity. Classical opinion dynamics models…

With the rise of computers, simulation models have emerged beside the more traditional statistical and mathematical models as a third pillar for ecological analysis. Broadly speaking, a simulation model is an algorithm, typically…

Different dependence scenarios can arise in multivariate extremes, entailing careful selection of an appropriate class of models. In bivariate extremes, the variables are either asymptotically dependent or are asymptotically independent.…

All possible types of deterministic choice behavior are classified by their degree of irrationality. This classification is performed in three steps: (1) select a benchmark of rationality, for which this degree is zero; (2) endow the set of…

We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to…

Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers--but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little…

A policymaker often wants to steer a decision-maker toward one of two actions, but lacks reliable knowledge of how the decision-maker perceives uncertainty or evaluates risk. We formalize a notion of robust paternalism: a modification a' of…

Mathematical models of infectious diseases, which are in principle analytically tractable, use two general approaches. The first approach, generally known as compartmental modeling, addresses the time evolution of disease propagation at the…

Epidemiological compartmental models are useful for understanding infectious disease propagation and directing public health policy decisions. Calibration of these models is an important step in offering accurate forecasts of disease…

The interevent time of terrorism attack events is investigated by empirical data and model analysis. Empirical evidence shows it follows a scale-free property. In order to understand the dynamic mechanism of such statistic feature, an…

Investigations of infectious disease outbreaks often focus on identifying place- and context-dependent factors responsible for emergence and spread, resulting in phenomenological narratives ill-suited to developing generalizable predictive…