Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…
Large-scale randomized experiments, sometimes called A/B tests, are increasingly prevalent in many industries. Though such experiments are often analyzed via frequentist $t$-tests, arguably such analyses are deficient: $p$-values are hard…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods perform inference on model-specific parameters of mechanistically motivated parametric statistical models when evaluating likelihoods is difficult. Central to the success of ABC methods is…
In this paper, we propose a general framework for combining evidence of varying quality to estimate underlying binary latent variables in the presence of restrictions imposed to respect the scientific context. The resulting algorithms…
Importance sampling is a popular technique in Bayesian inference: by reweighting samples drawn from a proposal distribution we are able to obtain samples and moment estimates from a Bayesian posterior over latent variables. Recent work,…
Of all the issues discussed at {\em Alife VII: Looking Forward, Looking Backward}, the issue of whether it was possible to create an artificial life system that exhibits {\em open-ended evolution} of novelty is by far the biggest. Of the 14…
I'll show that the kind of analogy between life and information [argue for by authors such as Davies (2000), Walker and Davies (2013), Dyson (1979), Gleick (2011), Kurzweil (2012), Ward (2009)], that seems to be central to the effect that…
Aging is a universal consequence of life, yet researchers have identified no universal theme. This manuscript considers aging from the perspective of entropy, wherein things fall apart. We first examine biological information change as a…
The number of recurrent events before a terminating event is often of interest. For instance, death terminates an individual's process of rehospitalizations and the number of rehospitalizations is an important indicator of economic cost. We…
Approximately 1.4 Ga after life first appeared, atmospheric oxygen suddenly jumped by more than an order of magnitude over a 20-50 Ma period. The contrast between these two timescales does not seem to be due to any sudden, large amplitude…
When our immune system encounters foreign antigens (i.e., from pathogens), the B cells that produce our antibodies undergo a cyclic process of proliferation, mutation, and selection, improving their ability to bind to the specific antigen.…
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…
Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources.…
Given i.i.d. data from an unknown distribution, we consider the problem of predicting future items. An adaptive way to estimate the probability density is to recursively subdivide the domain to an appropriate data-dependent granularity. A…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
The oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere 2.3 billion years ago, which on exoplanets is expected to be most detectable via the UV ozone feature at $\sim$0.25 $\mu$m, is often regarded as a sign of the emergence of photosynthetic life. On…
Life on Earth has experienced numerous upheavals over its approximately 4 billion year history. In previous work we have discussed how interruptions to stability lead, on average, to increases in habitability over time, a tendency we called…