Related papers: Ultrametricity increases the predictability of cul…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…
Communities are ubiquitous in nature and society. Individuals that share common properties often self-organize to form communities. Avoiding the shortages of computation complexity, pre-given information and unstable results in different…
Cultural values vary significantly around the world. Despite a large heterogeneity, similarities across national cultures are present. This paper studies cross-country culture heterogeneity via the joint inference of country-specific copula…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
The modeling of the spreading of communicable diseases has experienced significant advances in the last two decades or so. This has been possible due to the proliferation of data and the development of new methods to gather, mine and…
We develop a structural framework for modeling and inferring unobserved heterogeneity in dynamic panel-data models. Unlike methods treating clustering as a descriptive device, we model heterogeneity as arising from a latent clustering…
Mathematical modeling of disease spreading plays a crucial role in understanding, controlling and preventing epidemic outbreaks. In a microscopic description of the propagation of a disease over the complex network of human contacts, the…
Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in…
Popularity bias in recommender systems can increase cultural overrepresentation by favoring norms from dominant cultures and marginalizing underrepresented groups. This issue is critical for platforms offering cultural products, as they…
Mathematical modeling of disease outbreaks can infer the future trajectory of an epidemic, which can inform policy decisions. Another task is inferring the origin of a disease, which is relatively difficult with current mathematical models.…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Many classical models of collective behavior assume that emergent dynamics result from external and observable interactions among individuals. However, how collective dynamics in human populations depend on the internal psychological…
This work demonstrates how the concept of the entropic potential of events -- a parameter quantifying the influence of discrete events on the expected future entropy of a system -- can enhance uncertainty quantification, decision-making,…
The study of human mobility patterns is a crucially important research field for its impact on several socio-economic aspects and, in particular, the measure of regularity patters of human mobility can provide a across-the-board view of…
Predictability is an emerging metric that quantifies the highest possible prediction accuracy for a given time series, being widely utilized in assessing known prediction algorithms and characterizing intrinsic regularities in human…
Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…
Assessment of job performance, personalized health and psychometric measures are domains where data-driven and ubiquitous computing exhibits the potential of a profound impact in the future. Existing techniques use data extracted from…
Finding interdependency relations between (possibly multivariate) time series provides valuable knowledge about the processes that generate the signals. Information theory sets a natural framework for non-parametric measures of several…
EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation…