Related papers: What to do if N is two?
Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…
This paper will introduce a theory of emergent animal social complexity using various results from computational models and empirical results. These results will be organized into a vertical model of social complexity. This will support the…
Statistical thinking partially depends upon an iterative process by which essential features of a problem setting are identified and mapped onto an abstract model or archetype, and then translated back into the context of the original…
The usual problem for group testing is this: For a given number of individuals and a given prevalence, how many tests T* are required to find every infected individual? In real life, however, the problem is usually different: For a given…
Statistical methodology plays a crucial role in drug regulation. Decisions by the FDA or EMA are typically made based on multiple primary studies testing the same medical product, where the two-trials rule is the standard requirement,…
Neuroscience has recently made much progress, expanding the complexity of both neural-activity measurements and brain-computational models. However, we lack robust methods for connecting theory and experiment by evaluating our new big…
Applied statistical problems often come with pre-specified groupings to predictors. It is natural to test for the presence of simultaneous group-wide signal for groups in isolation, or for multiple groups together. Classical tests for the…
We propose a statistical framework to investigate whether a given subpopulation lies between two other subpopulations in a multivariate feature space. This methodology is motivated by a biological question from a collaborator: Is a newly…
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…
Although living organisms are affected by many interrelated and unidentified variables, this complexity does not automatically impose a fundamental limitation on statistical inference. Nor need one invoke such complexity as an explanation…
In animal groups, individual decisions are best characterised by probabilistic rules. Furthermore, animals of many species live in small groups. Probabilistic interactions among small numbers of individuals lead to a so called intrinsic…
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is mainly based on empirical fits to…
Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and…
In this article we provide a systematic experimental method for sorting animals according to socially relevant traits, without assaying them or even tagging them individually. Instead, they are repeatedly subjected to behavioural assays in…
Population size estimation based on two sample capture-recapture type experiment is an interesting problem in various fields including epidemiology, pubic health, population studies, etc. The Lincoln-Petersen estimate is popularly used…
We provide methods to validate and compare sensor outputs, or inference algorithms applied to sensor data, by adapting statistical scoring rules. The reported output should either be in the form of a prediction interval or of a parameter…
The ability to discriminate between large and small quantities is a core aspect of basic numerical competence in both humans and animals. In this work, we examine the extent to which the state-of-the-art neural networks designed for vision…
A growing body of literature attempts to learn about contagion using observational (i.e. non-experimental) data collected from a single social network. While the conclusions of these studies may be correct, the methods rely on assumptions…
The literature on "mechanism design from samples," which has flourished in recent years at the interface of economics and computer science, offers a bridge between the classic computer-science approach of worst-case analysis (corresponding…