Related papers: What to do if N is two?
Individual neurons often produce highly variable responses over nominally identical trials, reflecting a mixture of intrinsic "noise" and systematic changes in the animal's cognitive and behavioral state. Disentangling these sources of…
Biological networks exhibit complex, coordinated patterns of activity. Can these patterns be captured precisely in simple models? Here we use measurements of simultaneous activity in 1000+ neurons in the mouse brain to test the validity of…
Neuroimaging research has predominantly drawn conclusions based on classical statistics, including null-hypothesis testing, t-tests, and ANOVA. Throughout recent years, statistical learning methods enjoy increasing popularity, including…
Despite their importance in supporting experimental conclusions, standard statistical tests are often inadequate for research areas, like the life sciences, where the typical sample size is small and the test assumptions difficult to…
The last decades saw dramatic progress in brain research. These advances were often buttressed by probing single variables to make circumscribed discoveries, typically through null hypothesis significance testing. New ways for generating…
Hypothesis testing in high dimensional data is a notoriously difficult problem without direct access to competing models' likelihood functions. This paper argues that statistical divergences can be used to quantify the difference between…
Physical theories that depend on many parameters or are tested against data from many different experiments pose unique challenges to statistical inference. Many models in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology fall into one or both…
The statistical problem of using an initial sample to estimate the number of species in a larger sample has found important applications in fields far removed from ecology. Here we address the general problem of estimating the number of…
The present work shows that the maximum-entropy method can be applied to a sample of neuronal recordings along two different routes: (1) apply to the sample; or (2) apply to a larger, unsampled neuronal population from which the sample is…
Nowadays, it is possible to record the activity of hundreds of cells at the same time in behaving animals. However, these data are often treated and analyzed as if they consisted of many independently recorded neurons. How can neuronal…
Every scientific endeavour consists of (at least) two components: A hypothesis on the one hand and data on the other. There is always a more or less abstract level - some theory, a set of concepts, certain relations of ideas - and a…
Regression methods dominate the practice of biostatistical analysis, but biostatistical training emphasises the details of regression models and methods ahead of the purposes for which such modelling might be useful. More broadly,…
A great deal of inference in statistics is based on making the approximation that a statistic is normally distributed. The error in doing so is generally $O(n^{-1/2})$ and can be very considerable when the distribution is heavily biased or…
A diversity of decision-making systems has been observed in animal collectives. In some species, choices depend on the differences of the numbers of animals that have chosen each of the available options, while in other species on the…
Traditional statistical inference considers relatively small data sets and the corresponding theoretical analysis focuses on the asymptotic behavior of a statistical estimator when the number of samples approaches infinity. However, many…
A series of examples of computational models is provided, where the model aim is to interpret numerical results in terms of internal states of agents minds. Two opposite strategies or research can be distinguished in the literature. First…
For testing the statistical significance of a treatment effect, we usually compare between two parts of a population, one is exposed to the treatment, and the other is not exposed to it. Standard parametric and nonparametric two-sample…
Sample splitting is widely used in statistical applications, including classically in classification and more recently for inference post model selection. Motivating by problems in the study of diet, physical activity, and health, we…
Statistical NLP systems are frequently evaluated and compared on the basis of their performances on a single split of training and test data. Results obtained using a single split are, however, subject to sampling noise. In this paper we…
Over the past decade network theory has been applied successfully to the study of a variety of complex adaptive systems. However, the application of these techniques to non-human social networks has several shortfalls. Firstly, in most…