Related papers: Statistical mechanics unifies different ecological…
The Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE) predicts a universal species-area relationship (SAR) that can be fully characterized using only the total abundance (N) and species richness (S) at a single spatial scale. This theory has shown…
The conditional maximum-entropy method (abbreviated here as C-MaxEnt) is formulated for selecting prior probability distributions in Bayesian statistics for parameter estimation. This method is inspired by a statistical-mechanical approach…
The application of principles of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to economic systems is considered in a broad historical perspective, extending from prehistoric times to the present day. The hypothesis of maximum entropy production…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
A central question in ecology is to understand the ecological processes that shape community structure. Niche-based theories have emphasized the important role played by competition for maintaining species diversity. Many of these insights…
Maximum entropy (Maxent) models are a class of statistical models that use the maximum entropy principle to estimate probability distributions from data. Due to the size of modern data sets, Maxent models need efficient optimization…
Generating synthetic populations from aggregate statistics is a core component of microsimulation, agent-based modeling, policy analysis, and privacy-preserving data release. Beyond classical census marginals, many applications require…
Entropy serves as a central observable which indicates uncertainty in many chemical, thermodynamical, biological and ecological systems, and the principle of the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) is widely supported in natural science. Recently,…
Separating environmental effects from those of interspecific interactions on species distributions has always been a central objective of community ecology. Despite years of effort in analysing patterns of species co-occurrences and the…
Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by…
A major challenge for community ecology is using spatio-temporal data to infer parameters of dynamical models without conducting laborious experiments. We present a novel framework from statistical physics -- Maximum Caliber -- to…
Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…
Understanding the behaviors of ecological systems is challenging given their multi-faceted complexity. To proceed, theoretical models such as Lotka-Volterra dynamics with random interactions have been investigated by the dynamical…
Understanding the assembly of ecosystems to estimate the number of species at different spatial scales is a challenging problem. Until now, maximum entropy approaches have lacked the important feature of considering space in an explicit…
Inferring the input parameters of simulators from observations is a crucial challenge with applications from epidemiology to molecular dynamics. Here we show a simple approach in the regime of sparse data and approximately correct models,…
The maximum entropy principle from statistical mechanics states that a closed system attains an equilibrium distribution that maximizes its entropy. We first show that for graphs with fixed number of edges one can define a stochastic edge…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…
This is a preliminary article stating and proving a new maximum entropy theorem. The entropies that we consider can be used as measures of biodiversity. In that context, the question is: for a given collection of species, which frequency…
The macro-to-micro transition in a heterogeneous material is envisaged as the selection of a probability distribution by the Principle of Maximum Entropy (MAXENT). The material is made of constituents, e.g. given crystal orientations. Each…