3,260 research outputs found
Learning Independent Causal Mechanisms
Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we
usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the
point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced
by physical mechanisms that give rise to dependences between observables.
Mechanisms, however, can be meaningful autonomous modules of generative models
that make sense beyond a particular entailed data distribution, lending
themselves to transfer between problems. We develop an algorithm to recover a
set of independent (inverse) mechanisms from a set of transformed data points.
The approach is unsupervised and based on a set of experts that compete for
data generated by the mechanisms, driving specialization. We analyze the
proposed method in a series of experiments on image data. Each expert learns to
map a subset of the transformed data back to a reference distribution. The
learned mechanisms generalize to novel domains. We discuss implications for
transfer learning and links to recent trends in generative modeling.Comment: ICML 201
Model-free reconstruction of neuronal network connectivity from calcium imaging signals
A systematic assessment of global neural network connectivity through direct
electrophysiological assays has remained technically unfeasible even in
dissociated neuronal cultures. We introduce an improved algorithmic approach
based on Transfer Entropy to reconstruct approximations to network structural
connectivities from network activity monitored through calcium fluorescence
imaging. Based on information theory, our method requires no prior assumptions
on the statistics of neuronal firing and neuronal connections. The performance
of our algorithm is benchmarked on surrogate time-series of calcium
fluorescence generated by the simulated dynamics of a network with known
ground-truth topology. We find that the effective network topology revealed by
Transfer Entropy depends qualitatively on the time-dependent dynamic state of
the network (e.g., bursting or non-bursting). We thus demonstrate how
conditioning with respect to the global mean activity improves the performance
of our method. [...] Compared to other reconstruction strategies such as
cross-correlation or Granger Causality methods, our method based on improved
Transfer Entropy is remarkably more accurate. In particular, it provides a good
reconstruction of the network clustering coefficient, allowing to discriminate
between weakly or strongly clustered topologies, whereas on the other hand an
approach based on cross-correlations would invariantly detect artificially high
levels of clustering. Finally, we present the applicability of our method to
real recordings of in vitro cortical cultures. We demonstrate that these
networks are characterized by an elevated level of clustering compared to a
random graph (although not extreme) and by a markedly non-local connectivity.Comment: 54 pages, 8 figures (+9 supplementary figures), 1 table; submitted
for publicatio
Editorial Comment on the Special Issue of "Information in Dynamical Systems and Complex Systems"
This special issue collects contributions from the participants of the
"Information in Dynamical Systems and Complex Systems" workshop, which cover a
wide range of important problems and new approaches that lie in the
intersection of information theory and dynamical systems. The contributions
include theoretical characterization and understanding of the different types
of information flow and causality in general stochastic processes, inference
and identification of coupling structure and parameters of system dynamics,
rigorous coarse-grain modeling of network dynamical systems, and exact
statistical testing of fundamental information-theoretic quantities such as the
mutual information. The collective efforts reported herein reflect a modern
perspective of the intimate connection between dynamical systems and
information flow, leading to the promise of better understanding and modeling
of natural complex systems and better/optimal design of engineering systems
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