Related papers: Trivial pursuits
Unobserved confounding arises when an unmeasured feature influences both the treatment and the outcome, leading to biased causal effect estimates. This issue undermines observational studies in fields like economics, medicine, ecology or…
We consider an experimental design setting in which units are assigned to treatment after being sampled sequentially from an infinite population. We derive asymptotic efficiency bounds that apply to data from any experiment that assigns…
An increasing number of studies have demonstrated correlations between climate trends and body size change of organisms. In many cases, climate might be expected to influence body size by altering thermoregulation, energetics or food…
The energy of a finite system thermally connected to a thermal reservoir may fluctuate, while the temperature is a constant representing a thermodynamic property of the reservoir. The finite system can also be used as a thermometer for the…
Disagreement remains on what the target estimand should be for population-adjusted indirect treatment comparisons. This debate is of central importance for policy-makers and applied practitioners in health technology assessment.…
We show that the dynamical equations describing the collective behavior of the model introduced by Cavagna et al. i) are not their Eqs. (5,6) but rather ii) are the same as those of the minority game (MG). As a consequence the analytic…
The condition of thermal equilibrium simplifies the theoretical treatment of fluctuations as found in the celebrated Einstein's relation between mobility and diffusivity for Brownian motion. Several recent theories relax the hypothesis of…
We analyze the dynamics of a Brownian gas in contact with a heat bath in which large temperature fluctuations occur. There are two distinct time scales present, one describes the decay of the fluctuations in the temperature and the other…
We discuss some of the fundamental practical limitations of the Fluctuation-Enhanced Sensing of odors and gases. We address resolution, measurement speed, reproducibility, memory and other problems such as humidity. Various techniques and…
Determining whether Global Average Temperature (GAT) is an integrated process of order 1, I(1), or is a stationary process around a trend function is crucial for detection, attribution, impact and forecasting studies of climate change. In…
In many biological processes, the size of a population changes stochastically with time, and recent work in the context of cancer and bacterial growth have focused on the situation when the mean population size grows exponentially. Here,…
Active matter and driven systems exhibit statistical fluctuations in density and particle positions, providing an indirect indicator of dissipation across multiple length and time scales. Here, we quantitatively relate these measurable…
Coherently moving flocks of birds, beasts or bacteria are examples of living matter with spontaneous orientational order. How do these systems differ from thermal equilibrium systems with such liquid-crystalline order? Working with a…
Organisms adapt to fluctuating environments by regulating their dynamics, and by adjusting their phenotypes to environmental changes. We model population growth using multitype branching processes in random environments, where the offspring…
In many experimental or quasi-experimental studies, outcomes of interest are only observed for subjects who select (or are selected) to engage in the activity generating the outcome. Outcome data is thus endogenously missing for units who…
Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms, money invested in mutual funds, the GDP of individual countries and the scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar growth…
Many natural systems exhibit dynamics characterized by alternating phases or recurring sets of states. Describing the fluctuations of such systems over stochastic trajectories is necessary across diverse fields, from biological motors to…
The spreading of evolutionary novelties across populations is the central element of adaptation. Unless population are well-mixed (like bacteria in a shaken test tube), the spreading dynamics not only depends on fitness differences but also…
Suppose one is interested in estimating causal effects in the presence of potentially unmeasured confounding with the aid of a valid instrumental variable. This paper investigates the problem of making inferences about the average treatment…
A basic issue in both teaching of and practice of statistics is the interplay between modelling assumptions and inference performance. The general message conveyed is that stronger assumptions lead to better statistical performance of the…