53,971 research outputs found
Statistical models of complex brain networks: a maximum entropy approach
The brain is a highly complex system. Most of such complexity stems from the
intermingled connections between its parts, which give rise to rich dynamics
and to the emergence of high-level cognitive functions. Disentangling the
underlying network structure is crucial to understand the brain functioning
under both healthy and pathological conditions. Yet, analyzing brain networks
is challenging, in part because their structure represents only one possible
realization of a generative stochastic process which is in general unknown.
Having a formal way to cope with such intrinsic variability is therefore
central for the characterization of brain network properties. Addressing this
issue entails the development of appropriate tools mostly adapted from network
science and statistics. Here, we focus on a particular class of maximum entropy
models for networks, i.e. exponential random graph models (ERGMs), as a
parsimonious approach to identify the local connection mechanisms behind
observed global network structure. Efforts are reviewed on the quest for basic
organizational properties of human brain networks, as well as on the
identification of predictive biomarkers of neurological diseases such as
stroke. We conclude with a discussion on how emerging results and tools from
statistical graph modeling, associated with forthcoming improvements in
experimental data acquisition, could lead to a finer probabilistic description
of complex systems in network neuroscience.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure
Consensus Computation in Unreliable Networks: A System Theoretic Approach
This work addresses the problem of ensuring trustworthy computation in a
linear consensus network. A solution to this problem is relevant for several
tasks in multi-agent systems including motion coordination, clock
synchronization, and cooperative estimation. In a linear consensus network, we
allow for the presence of misbehaving agents, whose behavior deviate from the
nominal consensus evolution. We model misbehaviors as unknown and unmeasurable
inputs affecting the network, and we cast the misbehavior detection and
identification problem into an unknown-input system theoretic framework. We
consider two extreme cases of misbehaving agents, namely faulty (non-colluding)
and malicious (Byzantine) agents. First, we characterize the set of inputs that
allow misbehaving agents to affect the consensus network while remaining
undetected and/or unidentified from certain observing agents. Second, we
provide worst-case bounds for the number of concurrent faulty or malicious
agents that can be detected and identified. Precisely, the consensus network
needs to be 2k+1 (resp. k+1) connected for k malicious (resp. faulty) agents to
be generically detectable and identifiable by every well behaving agent. Third,
we quantify the effect of undetectable inputs on the final consensus value.
Fourth, we design three algorithms to detect and identify misbehaving agents.
The first and the second algorithm apply fault detection techniques, and
affords complete detection and identification if global knowledge of the
network is available to each agent, at a high computational cost. The third
algorithm is designed to exploit the presence in the network of weakly
interconnected subparts, and provides local detection and identification of
misbehaving agents whose behavior deviates more than a threshold, which is
quantified in terms of the interconnection structure
Network Reconstruction from Intrinsic Noise
This paper considers the problem of inferring an unknown network of dynamical
systems driven by unknown, intrinsic, noise inputs. Equivalently we seek to
identify direct causal dependencies among manifest variables only from
observations of these variables. For linear, time-invariant systems of minimal
order, we characterise under what conditions this problem is well posed. We
first show that if the transfer matrix from the inputs to manifest states is
minimum phase, this problem has a unique solution irrespective of the network
topology. This is equivalent to there being only one valid spectral factor (up
to a choice of signs of the inputs) of the output spectral density.
If the assumption of phase-minimality is relaxed, we show that the problem is
characterised by a single Algebraic Riccati Equation (ARE), of dimension
determined by the number of latent states. The number of solutions to this ARE
is an upper bound on the number of solutions for the network. We give necessary
and sufficient conditions for any two dynamical networks to have equal output
spectral density, which can be used to construct all equivalent networks.
Extensive simulations quantify the number of solutions for a range of problem
sizes. For a slightly simpler case, we also provide an algorithm to construct
all equivalent networks from the output spectral density.Comment: 11 pages, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro
Identifying Nonlinear 1-Step Causal Influences in Presence of Latent Variables
We propose an approach for learning the causal structure in stochastic
dynamical systems with a -step functional dependency in the presence of
latent variables. We propose an information-theoretic approach that allows us
to recover the causal relations among the observed variables as long as the
latent variables evolve without exogenous noise. We further propose an
efficient learning method based on linear regression for the special sub-case
when the dynamics are restricted to be linear. We validate the performance of
our approach via numerical simulations
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