Related papers: Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
Deep convolutional neural networks have shown remarkable performance on various computer vision tasks, and yet, they are susceptible to picking up spurious correlations from the training signal. So called `shortcuts' can occur during…
Selecting relevant features associated with a given response variable is an important issue in many scientific fields. Quantifying quality and uncertainty of a selection result via false discovery rate (FDR) control has been of recent…
We introduce a model of DNA sequence evolution which can account for biases in mutation rates that depend on the identity of the neighboring bases. An analytic solution for this class of non-equilibrium models is developed by adopting…
Evolution of gene regulation is crucial for our understanding of the phenotypic differences between species, populations and individuals. Sequence-specific binding of transcription factors to the regulatory regions on the DNA is a key…
Transcription factors (TFs) exert their regulatory action by binding to DNA with specific sequence preferences. However, different TFs can partially share their binding sequences due to their common evolutionary origin. This `redundancy' of…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
Density dependence is important in the ecology and evolution of microbial and cancer cells. Typically, we can only measure net growth rates, but the underlying density-dependent mechanisms that give rise to the observed dynamics can…
Two major sources of stochasticity in the dynamics of neutral alleles result from resampling of finite populations (genetic drift) and the random genetic background of nearby selected alleles on which the neutral alleles are found (linked…
Dynamic feature selection (DFS) addresses budget constraints in decision-making by sequentially acquiring features for each instance, making it appealing for resource-limited scenarios. However, existing DFS methods require models…
Discovering evolutionary traits that are heritable across species on the tree of life (also referred to as a phylogenetic tree) is of great interest to biologists to understand how organisms diversify and evolve. However, the measurement of…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
Observed differences in mean phenotypic values across human groups have attracted renewed interest with the rise of large-scale genomic studies and polygenic risk prediction. However, the genetic basis of these differences is far more…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
Embedding learning has found widespread applications in recommendation systems and natural language modeling, among other domains. To learn quality embeddings efficiently, adaptive learning rate algorithms have demonstrated superior…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
The statistical regularities in language corpora encode well-known social biases into word embeddings. Here, we focus on gender to provide a comprehensive analysis of group-based biases in widely-used static English word embeddings trained…
Stochastic models of evolution (Markov random fields on trivalent trees) generally assume that different characters (different runs of the stochastic process) are independent and identically distributed. In this paper we take the first…