Related papers: What constrains food webs? A maximum entropy frame…
Degree distributions have been widely used to characterize biological networks including food webs, and play a vital role in recent models of food web structure. While food webs degree distributions have been suggested to follow various…
Food web topology and energy flow rates across food web linkages can influence ecosystem properties such as stability. Stability predictions from current models of energy flow are often sensitive to details in their formulation, and their…
In most data-scientific approaches, the principle of Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) is used to a posteriori justify some parametric model which has been already chosen based on experience, prior knowledge or computational simplicity. In a…
Understanding how network function constrains neural connectivity is a central challenge in neuroscience. An influential approach is to train neural networks with gradient descent on cognitive tasks and characterize the resulting…
Maximum entropy principle (MEP) offers an effective and unbiased approach to inferring unknown probability distributions when faced with incomplete information, while neural networks provide the flexibility to learn complex distributions…
Notable recent works have focused on the multi-layer properties of coevolving diseases. We point out that very similar systems play an important role in population ecology. Specifically we study a meta food-web model that was recently…
Stochastic network models play a central role across a wide range of scientific disciplines, and questions of statistical inference arise naturally in this context. In this paper we investigate goodness-of-fit and two-sample testing…
Simplified mechanistic models in ecology have been criticized for the fact that a good fit to data does not imply the mechanism is true: pattern does not equal process. In parallel, the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) has been applied in…
Few of food web theory hypotheses/predictions can be readily tested using empirical data. An exception is represented by simple probabilistic models for food web structure, for which the likelihood has been derived. Here I test the…
This chapter provides a comprehensive and self-contained discussion of the most recent developments of information theory of networks. Maximum entropy models of networks are the least biased ensembles enforcing a set of constraints and are…
The field of complex networks studies a wide variety of interacting systems by representing them as networks. To understand their properties and mutual relations, the randomisation of network connections is a commonly used tool. However,…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
Recently there has been growing interest in the use of Maximum Relative Entropy (MaxREnt) as a tool for statistical inference in ecology. In contrast, here we propose MaxREnt as a tool for applying statistical mechanics to ecology. We use…
Let a collection of networks represent interactions within several (social or ecological) systems. We pursue two objectives: identifying similarities in the topological structures that are held in common between the networks and clustering…
The principle of maximum entropy (Maxent) is often used to obtain prior probability distributions as a method to obtain a Gibbs measure under some restriction giving the probability that a system will be in a certain state compared to the…
Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable motif profiles, patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species sub-graphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…
Food webs, networks of feeding relationships among organisms, provide fundamental insights into mechanisms that determine ecosystem stability and persistence. Despite long-standing interest in the compartmental structure of food webs, past…
Understanding the structural complexity and predictability of complex networks is a central challenge in network science. Although recent studies have revealed a relationship between compression-based entropy and link prediction…