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In inverse problems, one attempts to infer spatially variable functions from indirect measurements of a system. To practitioners of inverse problems, the concept of "information" is familiar when discussing key questions such as which parts…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
Due to increased awareness of data protection and corresponding laws many data, especially involving sensitive personal information, are not publicly accessible. Accordingly, many data collecting agencies only release aggregated data, e.g.…
We present a theoretical as well as experimental investigation of a population of self-replicating segments of code subject to random mutation and survival of the fittest. Under the assumption that such a system constitutes a minimal system…
A key feature of many developmental systems is their ability to self-organize spatial patterns of functionally distinct cell fates. To ensure proper biological function, such patterns must be established reproducibly, by controlling and…
We derive an analytical approximation for making quantitative predictions for ecological communities as a function of the mean intensity of the inter-specific competition and the species richness. This method, with only a fraction of the…
Tasks that require information about the world imply a trade-off between the time spent on observation and the variance of the response. In particular, fast decisions need to rely on uncertain information. However, standard estimates of…
Distributed computation in artificial life and complex systems is often described in terms of component operations on information: information storage, transfer and modification. Information modification remains poorly described however,…
Consider informative selection of a sample from a finite population. Responses are realized as independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables with a probability density function (p.d.f.) f, referred to as the…
Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about a latent entity is a critical task in many application domains, e.g., assessing individual student learning outcomes, diagnosing underlying diseases, or learning user preferences. Though…
Can we learn more from data than existed in the generating process itself? Can new and useful information be constructed from merely applying deterministic transformations to existing data? Can the learnable content in data be evaluated…
Synthetic data becomes crucial for large language model training, but its effectiveness is highly inconsistent. We provide an information-theoretic account of this inconsistency: synthetic data improves a model only when the…
Phylogenetic trees describe the evolutionary history of a group of present-day species from a common ancestor. These trees are typically reconstructed from aligned DNA sequence data. In this paper we analytically address the following…
Representation learning methods utilizing the InfoNCE loss have demonstrated considerable capacity in reducing human annotation effort by training invariant neural feature extractors. Although different variants of the training objective…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
During a spontaneous change, a macroscopic physical system will evolve towards a macro-state with more realizations. This observation is at the basis of the Statistical Mechanical version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it provides…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Information capacity of a symbol sequence is a measure of the unexpectedness of a continuation of given string of symbols. Continuation of a string is determined through the maximum entropy of the reconstructed frequency dictionary; the…
Large-scale replication studies like the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) provide invaluable systematic data on scientific replicability, but most analyses and interpretations of the data fail to agree on the definition of…