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Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…

Quantitative predictions about the processes that promote species coexistence are a subject of active research in ecology. In particular, competitive interactions are known to shape and maintain ecological communities, and situations where…

Recommender systems rely heavily on user feedback to learn effective user and item representations. Despite their widespread adoption, limited attention has been given to the uncertainty inherent in the feedback used to train these systems.…

A primary difficulty with unsupervised discovery of structure in large data sets is a lack of quantitative evaluation criteria. In this work, we propose and investigate several metrics for evaluating and comparing generative models of…

With ever-increasing available data, predicting individuals' preferences and helping them locate the most relevant information has become a pressing need. Understanding and predicting preferences is also important from a fundamental point…

There is growing recognition that the network structures arising from interactions between different entities in physical, social and biological systems fundamentally alter the evolutionary outcomes. Previous paradigm exploring evolutionary…

Collective action and group formation are fundamental behaviors among both organisms cooperating to maximize their fitness, and people forming socioeconomic organizations. Researchers have extensively explored social interaction structures…

Networks of social interactions are the substrate upon which civilizations are built. Often, we create new bonds with people that we like or feel that our relationships are damaged through the intervention of third parties. Despite their…

Social predictions do not passively describe the future; they actively shape it. They inform actions and change individual expectations in ways that influence the likelihood of the predicted outcome. Given these dynamics, to what extent can…

This article analyzes the problem of estimating the time until an event occurs, also known as survival modeling. We observe through substantial experiments on large real-world datasets and use-cases that populations are largely…

Recent advances in the quantitative, computational methodology for the modeling and analysis of heterogeneous large-scale data are leading to new opportunities for understanding of human behaviors and faculties, including the manifestation…

Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…

Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…

Understanding the collective dynamics behind the success of ideas, products, behaviors, and social actors is critical for decision-making across diverse contexts, including hiring, funding, career choices, and the design of interventions…

Social networks play an important role in analyzing the impact of individual-level interactions on societal or economic outcomes. We model interactive decision making for a community of individuals with different traits, represented by a…

Given only aggregate choice data and limited information about how menus are distributed across the population, we describe what can be inferred robustly about the distribution of preferences (or more general decision rules). We strengthen…

Epidemic disease spreading is conventionally often modelled and analyzed by means of rate and diffusion equations, following the paradigms of well-controlled chemical reactions and diffusive dynamics in a test tube. Yet, serious worries…

The contact structure between hosts has a critical influence on disease spread. However, most networkbased models used in epidemiology tend to ignore heterogeneity in the weighting of contacts. This assumption is known to be at odds with…

The goal of this paper is to provide mathematically rigorous tools for modelling the evolution of a community of interacting individuals. We model the population by a measure space where the measure determines the abundance of individual…

Direct prediction of material properties from microstructures through statistical models has shown to be a potential approach to accelerating computational material design with large design spaces. However, statistical modeling of highly…