Related papers: The Lindy Effect
In many applications, observed data are influenced by some combination of latent causes. For example, suppose sensors are placed inside a building to record responses such as temperature, humidity, power consumption and noise levels. These…
Hazard ratios are prone to selection bias, compromising their use as causal estimands. On the other hand, the hazard difference has been shown to remain unaffected by the selection of frailty factors over time. Therefore, observed hazard…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
The article presents a translation of some widespread financial terminology into the language of decision theory. For instance, financial leverage can be regarded as an object of choice or a decision. We show how the optics of decision…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
This position paper argues that the Baldwin effect is widely misunderstood by the evolutionary computation community. The misunderstandings appear to fall into two general categories. Firstly, it is commonly believed that the Baldwin effect…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate partial forecasting competence across social, political, and economic events. Yet, their predictive ability varies sharply with domain structure and prompt framing. We investigate how forecasting…
We report a rigorous theory to show the origin of the unexpected periodic behavior seen in the consecutive differences between prime numbers. We also check numerically our findings to ensure that they hold for finite sequences of primes,…
The notion of drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution, which is underlying the observed data, changes over time. Albeit many attempts were made to deal with drift, formal notions of drift are application-dependent and…
A logic is defined that allows to express information about statistical probabilities and about degrees of belief in specific propositions. By interpreting the two types of probabilities in one common probability space, the semantics given…
Although the existing causal inference literature focuses on the forward-looking perspective by estimating effects of causes, the backward-looking perspective can provide insights into causes of effects. In backward-looking causal…
A grid poset -- or grid for short -- is a product of chains. We ask, what does a random linear extension of a grid look like? In particular, we show that the average "jump number," i.e., the number of times that two consecutive elements in…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
Higher Education Institutions in the UK and elsewhere are under increasing pressure to measure the impact of their research, which can include how the research has increased scientific engagement amongst the general public. For various…
The notion of concept drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution, which is underlying the observed data, changes over time. We are interested in an identification of those features, that are most relevant for the observed drift.…
About 45,000 years ago, symbolic and technological complexity of human artefacts increased drastically. Computer simulations of Powell, Shennan and Thomas (2009) explained it through an increase of the population density, facilitating the…
Is an option especially tempting when it is both immediate and certain? I test the effect of risk on the present-bias factor given quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In my experiment workers allocate about thirty to fifty minutes of real-effort…
We study the identification of direct and indirect causes on time series and provide conditions in the presence of latent variables, which we prove to be necessary and sufficient under some graph constraints. Our theoretical results and…