89,778 research outputs found
A simple method for detecting chaos in nature
Chaos, or exponential sensitivity to small perturbations, appears everywhere
in nature. Moreover, chaos is predicted to play diverse functional roles in
living systems. A method for detecting chaos from empirical measurements should
therefore be a key component of the biologist's toolkit. But, classic
chaos-detection tools are highly sensitive to measurement noise and break down
for common edge cases, making it difficult to detect chaos in domains, like
biology, where measurements are noisy. However, newer tools promise to overcome
these limitations. Here, we combine several such tools into an automated
processing pipeline, and show that our pipeline can detect the presence (or
absence) of chaos in noisy recordings, even for difficult edge cases. As a
first-pass application of our pipeline, we show that heart rate variability is
not chaotic as some have proposed, and instead reflects a stochastic process in
both health and disease. Our tool is easy-to-use and freely available
Neural coding strategies and mechanisms of competition
A long running debate has concerned the question of whether neural
representations are encoded using a distributed or a local coding scheme. In
both schemes individual neurons respond to certain specific patterns of
pre-synaptic activity. Hence, rather than being dichotomous, both coding
schemes are based on the same representational mechanism. We argue that a
population of neurons needs to be capable of learning both local and distributed
representations, as appropriate to the task, and should be capable of generating
both local and distributed codes in response to different stimuli. Many neural
network algorithms, which are often employed as models of cognitive processes,
fail to meet all these requirements. In contrast, we present a neural network
architecture which enables a single algorithm to efficiently learn, and respond
using, both types of coding scheme
Simulation of networks of spiking neurons: A review of tools and strategies
We review different aspects of the simulation of spiking neural networks. We
start by reviewing the different types of simulation strategies and algorithms
that are currently implemented. We next review the precision of those
simulation strategies, in particular in cases where plasticity depends on the
exact timing of the spikes. We overview different simulators and simulation
environments presently available (restricted to those freely available, open
source and documented). For each simulation tool, its advantages and pitfalls
are reviewed, with an aim to allow the reader to identify which simulator is
appropriate for a given task. Finally, we provide a series of benchmark
simulations of different types of networks of spiking neurons, including
Hodgkin-Huxley type, integrate-and-fire models, interacting with current-based
or conductance-based synapses, using clock-driven or event-driven integration
strategies. The same set of models are implemented on the different simulators,
and the codes are made available. The ultimate goal of this review is to
provide a resource to facilitate identifying the appropriate integration
strategy and simulation tool to use for a given modeling problem related to
spiking neural networks.Comment: 49 pages, 24 figures, 1 table; review article, Journal of
Computational Neuroscience, in press (2007
Pairwise gene GO-based measures for biclustering of high-dimensional expression data
Background: Biclustering algorithms search for groups of genes that share the same
behavior under a subset of samples in gene expression data. Nowadays, the biological
knowledge available in public repositories can be used to drive these algorithms to
find biclusters composed of groups of genes functionally coherent. On the other hand,
a distance among genes can be defined according to their information stored in Gene
Ontology (GO). Gene pairwise GO semantic similarity measures report a value for each
pair of genes which establishes their functional similarity. A scatter search-based
algorithm that optimizes a merit function that integrates GO information is studied in
this paper. This merit function uses a term that addresses the information through a GO
measure.
Results: The effect of two possible different gene pairwise GO measures on the
performance of the algorithm is analyzed. Firstly, three well known yeast datasets with
approximately one thousand of genes are studied. Secondly, a group of human
datasets related to clinical data of cancer is also explored by the algorithm. Most of
these data are high-dimensional datasets composed of a huge number of genes. The
resultant biclusters reveal groups of genes linked by a same functionality when the
search procedure is driven by one of the proposed GO measures. Furthermore, a
qualitative biological study of a group of biclusters show their relevance from a cancer
disease perspective.
Conclusions: It can be concluded that the integration of biological information
improves the performance of the biclustering process. The two different GO measures
studied show an improvement in the results obtained for the yeast dataset. However, if
datasets are composed of a huge number of genes, only one of them really improves
the algorithm performance. This second case constitutes a clear option to explore
interesting datasets from a clinical point of view.Ministerio de EconomĂa y Competitividad TIN2014-55894-C2-
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Artificial Immune Systems - Models, algorithms and applications
Copyright © 2010 Academic Research Publishing Agency.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are computational paradigms that belong to the computational intelligence family and are inspired by the biological immune system. During the past decade, they have attracted a lot of interest from researchers aiming to develop immune-based models and techniques to solve complex computational or engineering problems. This work presents a survey of existing AIS models and algorithms with a focus on the last five years.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fun
Formal Modeling of Connectionism using Concurrency Theory, an Approach Based on Automata and Model Checking
This paper illustrates a framework for applying formal methods techniques, which are symbolic in nature, to specifying and verifying neural networks, which are sub-symbolic in nature. The paper describes a communicating automata [Bowman & Gomez, 2006] model of neural networks. We also implement the model using timed automata [Alur & Dill, 1994] and then undertake a verification of these models using the model checker Uppaal [Pettersson, 2000] in order to evaluate the performance of learning algorithms. This paper also presents discussion of a number of broad issues concerning cognitive neuroscience and the debate as to whether symbolic processing or connectionism is a suitable representation of cognitive systems. Additionally, the issue of integrating symbolic techniques, such as formal methods, with complex neural networks is discussed. We then argue that symbolic verifications may give theoretically well-founded ways to evaluate and justify neural learning systems in the field of both theoretical research and real world applications
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