Voting Power of Teams Working Together

Voting power determines the "power" of individuals who cast votes; their power is based on their ability to influence the winning-ness of a coalition. Usually each individual acts alone, casting either all or none of their votes and is equally likely to do either. This paper extends this standard "random voting" model to allow probabilistic voting, partial voting, and correlated team voting. We extend the standard Banzhaf metric to account for these cases; our generalization reduces to the standard metric under "random voting", This new paradigm allows us to answer questions such as "In the 2013 US Senate, how much more unified would the Republicans have to be in order to have the same power as the Democrats in attaining cloture?

On Random Allocation Models in the Thermodynamic Limit

We discuss the phase transition and critical exponents in the random allocation model (urn model) for different statistical ensembles. We provide a unified presentation of the statistical properties of the model in the thermodynamic limit, uncover new relationships between the thermodynamic potentials and fill some lacunae in previous results on the singularities of these potentials at the critical point and behaviour in the thermodynamic limit. The presentation is intended to be self-contained, so we carefully derive all formulae step by step throughout. Additionally, we comment on a quasi-probabilistic normalisation of configuration weights which has been considered in some recent studie

Generalized information theory meets human cognition: Introducing a unified framework to model uncertainty and information search

Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is often modeled by assuming that people’s goal is to reduce uncertainty about possible states of the world. In cognitive science, psychology, and medical decision making, Shannon entropy is the most prominent and most widely used model to formalize probabilistic uncertainty and the reduction thereof. However, a variety of alternative entropy metrics (Hartley, Quadratic, Tsallis, Rényi, and more) are popular in the social and the natural sciences, computer science, and philosophy of science. Particular entropy measures have been predominant in particular research areas, and it is often an open issue whether these divergences emerge from different theoretical and practical goals or are merely due to historical accident. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, we show that several entropy and entropy reduction measures arise as special cases in a unified formalism, the Sharma-Mittal framework. Using mathematical results, computer simulations, and analyses of published behavioral data, we discuss four key questions: How do various entropy models relate to each other? What insights can be obtained by considering diverse entropy models within a unified framework? What is the psychological plausibility of different entropy models? What new questions and insights for research on human information acquisition follow? Our work provides several new pathways for theoretical and empirical research, reconciling apparently conflicting approaches and empirical findings within a comprehensive and unified information-theoretic formalism

MODEL-FORM UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION FOR PREDICTIVE PROBABILISTIC GRAPHICAL MODELS

In this thesis, we focus on Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis, which can provide performance guarantees for predictive models built with both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, as well as data, and identify which components in a model have the most influence on predictions of our quantities of interest. In the first part (Chapter 2), we propose non-parametric methods for both local and global sensitivity analysis of chemical reaction models with correlated parameter dependencies. The developed mathematical and statistical tools are applied to a benchmark Langmuir competitive adsorption model on a close packed platinum surface, whose parameters, estimated from quantum-scale computations, are correlated and are limited in size (small data). The proposed mathematical methodology employs gradient-based methods to compute sensitivity indices. We observe that ranking influential parameters depend critically on whether or not correlations between parameters are taken into account. The impact of uncertainty in the correlation and the necessity of the proposed non-parametric perspective are demonstrated. In the second part (Chapter 3-4), we develop new information-based uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis methods for Probabilistic Graphical Models. Probabilistic graphical models are an important class of methods for probabilistic modeling and inference, probabilistic machine learning, and probabilistic artificial intelligence. Its hierarchical structure allows us to bring together in a systematic way statistical and multi-scale physical modeling, different types of data, incorporating expert knowledge, correlations, and causal relationships. However, due to multi-scale modeling, learning from sparse data, and mechanisms without full knowledge, many predictive models will necessarily have diverse sources of uncertainty at different scales. The new model-form uncertainty quantification indices we developed can handle both parametric and non-parametric probabilistic graphical models, as well as small and large model/parameter perturbations in a single, unified mathematical framework and provide an envelope of model predictions for our quantities of interest. Moreover, we propose a model-form Sensitivity Index, which allows us to rank the impact of each component of the probabilistic graphical model, and provide a systematic methodology to close the experiment - model - simulation - prediction loop and improve the computational model iteratively based on our new uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis methods. To illustrate our ideas, we explore a physicochemical application on the Oxygen Reduction Reaction (ORR) in Chapter 4, whose optimization was identified as a key to the performance of fuel cells. In the last part (Chapter 5), we complete our discussion for the uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis methods on probabilistic graphical models by introducing a new sensitivity analysis method for the case where we know the real model sits in a certain parametric family. Note that the uncertainty indices above may be too pessimistic (as they are inherently non-parametric) when studying uncertainty/sensitivity questions for models confined within a given parametric family. Therefore, we develop a method using likelihood ratio and fisher information matrix, which can capture correlations and causal dependencies in the graphical models, and we show it can provide us more accurate results for the parametric probabilistic graphical models