Related papers: The Characteristic Time Scale of Cultural Evolutio…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
Recovering a unique causal graph from observational data is an ill-posed problem because multiple generating mechanisms can lead to the same observational distribution. This problem becomes solvable only by exploiting specific structural or…
We use a statistical model to investigate the detectability (defined by the requirement that they are in causal contact with us) of communicating civilizations within a volume of the universe surrounding our location. If the civilizations…
All human societies present unique narratives that shape their customs and beliefs. Despite cultural differences, some symbolic elements (e.g., heroes and tricksters) are common across many cultures. Here, we reconcile these seemingly…
Spatial boundaries, such as ecological transitions or climatic regime interfaces, capture steep environmental gradients, and shifts in their structure can signal emerging environmental changes. Quantifying uncertainty in spatial boundary…
Many studies record replicated time series epochs from different groups with the goal of using frequency domain properties to discriminate between the groups. In many applications, there exists variation in cyclical patterns from time…
Understanding the relationship between change in crime over time and the geography of urban areas is an important problem for urban planning. Accurate estimation of changing crime rates throughout a city would aid law enforcement as well as…
We investigate the problem of discovering and modeling regime shifts in an ecosystem comprising multiple time series known as co-evolving time series. Regime shifts refer to the changing behaviors exhibited by series at different time…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Urban systems are characterized by populations with heterogeneous characteristics, and whose spatial distribution is crucial to understand inequalities in life expectancy or education level. Traditional studies on spatial segregation…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
We study hierarchical clusterings of metric spaces that change over time. This is a natural geometric primitive for the analysis of dynamic data sets. Specifically, we introduce and study the problem of finding a temporally coherent…
Characteristic scale is a notion that pervades the geophysical sciences, but it has no widely accepted precise definition. The wavelet transform decomposes a time series into coefficients that are associated with different scales. The…
There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of individual and collective mobility patterns. On one hand, a highly influential stream of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical datasets…
There are many natural, physical, and biological systems that exhibit multiple time scales. For example, the dynamics of a population of ticks can be described in continuous time during their individual life cycle yet discrete time is used…
Performance of text classification models tends to drop over time due to changes in data, which limits the lifetime of a pretrained model. Therefore an ability to predict a model's ability to persist over time can help design models that…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
Scaling in complex supply networks is a population-level optimization phenomenon thought to arise from the evolutions of the underlying individual networks, but the evolution-scaling connection has not been empirically demonstrated. Here,…
Burstiness, the tendency of interaction events to be heterogeneously distributed in time, is critical to information diffusion in physical and social systems. However, an analytical framework capturing the effect of burstiness on generic…
We consider a branching model in discrete time where each individual has a trait in some general state space. Both the reproduction law and the trait inherited by the offsprings may depend on the trait of the mother and the environment. We…