576,794 research outputs found
Identifying Complexity by Means of Matrices
Complexity is an interdisciplinary concept which, first of all, addresses the
question of how order emerges out of randomness. For many reasons matrices
provide a very practical and powerful tool in approaching and quantifying the
related characteristics. Based on several natural complex dynamical systems,
like the strongly interacting quantum many-body systems, the human brain and
the financial markets, by relating empirical observations to the random matrix
theory and quantifying deviations in term of a reduced dimensionality, we
present arguments in favour of the statement that complexity is a pheomenon at
the edge between collectivity and chaos.Comment: Talk given by S. Drozdz at "Horizons in Complex Systems", Messina,
December 5-8, 200
Report on the 1980/81 angling census in the Sanyati Gorge, Lake Kariba
The angling census carried out in the Sanyati Gorge, August 1980 - March 1981, is reported. The results are compared to those obtained in the 1973 census. The objectives of the census were: 1) to determine the extent of angling mortality on tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus) thereby quantifying this previously neglected component of total mortality; and 2) to assess the economic importance of tigerfish to the recreational fishery on Lake Kariba
Performance analysis and optimal selection of large mean-variance portfolios under estimation risk
We study the consistency of sample mean-variance portfolios of arbitrarily
high dimension that are based on Bayesian or shrinkage estimation of the input
parameters as well as weighted sampling. In an asymptotic setting where the
number of assets remains comparable in magnitude to the sample size, we provide
a characterization of the estimation risk by providing deterministic
equivalents of the portfolio out-of-sample performance in terms of the
underlying investment scenario. The previous estimates represent a means of
quantifying the amount of risk underestimation and return overestimation of
improved portfolio constructions beyond standard ones. Well-known for the
latter, if not corrected, these deviations lead to inaccurate and overly
optimistic Sharpe-based investment decisions. Our results are based on recent
contributions in the field of random matrix theory. Along with the asymptotic
analysis, the analytical framework allows us to find bias corrections improving
on the achieved out-of-sample performance of typical portfolio constructions.
Some numerical simulations validate our theoretical findings
An interferometric complementarity experiment in a bulk Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ensemble
We have experimentally demonstrated the interferometric complementarity,
which relates the distinguishability quantifying the amount of which-way
(WW) information to the fringe visibility characterizing the wave feature
of a quantum entity, in a bulk ensemble by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)
techniques. We primarily concern on the intermediate cases: partial fringe
visibility and incomplete WW information. We propose a quantitative measure of
by an alternative geometric strategy and investigate the relation between
and entanglement. By measuring and independently, it turns out that
the duality relation holds for pure quantum states of the
markers.Comment: 13 page, 5 PS figure
Quantifying uncertainty in health impact assessment: a case-study example on indoor housing ventilation.
Quantitative health impact assessment (HIA) is increasingly being used to assess the health impacts attributable to an environmental policy or intervention. As a consequence, there is a need to assess uncertainties in the assessments because of the uncertainty in the HIA models. In this paper, a framework is developed to quantify the uncertainty in the health impacts of environmental interventions and is applied to evaluate the impacts of poor housing ventilation. The paper describes the development of the framework through three steps: (i) selecting the relevant exposure metric and quantifying the evidence of potential health effects of the exposure; (ii) estimating the size of the population affected by the exposure and selecting the associated outcome measure; (iii) quantifying the health impact and its uncertainty. The framework introduces a novel application for the propagation of uncertainty in HIA, based on fuzzy set theory. Fuzzy sets are used to propagate parametric uncertainty in a non-probabilistic space and are applied to calculate the uncertainty in the morbidity burdens associated with three indoor ventilation exposure scenarios: poor, fair and adequate. The case-study example demonstrates how the framework can be used in practice, to quantify the uncertainty in health impact assessment where there is insufficient information to carry out a probabilistic uncertainty analysis
Information gain versus state disturbance for a single qubit
The trade-off between the information gain and the state disturbance is
derived for quantum operations on a single qubit prepared in a uniformly
distributed pure state. The derivation is valid for a class of measures
quantifying the state disturbance and the information gain which satisfy
certain invariance conditions. This class includes in particular the Shannon
entropy versus the operation fidelity. The central role in the derivation is
played by efficient quantum operations, which leave the system in a pure output
state for any measurement outcome. It is pointed out that the optimality of
efficient quantum operations among those inducing a given operator-valued
measure is related to Davies' characterization of convex invariant functions on
hermitian operators.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX, osid.sty. Substantially expanded and generalize
Fan-out in Gene Regulatory Networks
In synthetic biology, gene regulatory circuits are often constructed by
combining smaller circuit components. Connections between components are
achieved by transcription factors acting on promoters. If the individual
components behave as true modules and certain module interface conditions are
satisfied, the function of the composite circuits can in principle be
predicted. In this paper, we investigate one of the interface conditions:
fan-out. We quantify the fan-out, a concept widely used in electric
engineering, to indicate the maximum number of the downstream inputs that an
upstream output transcription factor can regulate. We show that the fan-out is
closely related to retroactivity studied by Del Vecchio, et al. We propose an
efficient operational method for measuring the fan-out that can be applied to
various types of module interfaces. We also show that the fan-out can be
enhanced by self-inhibitory regulation on the output. We discuss the potential
role of the inhibitory regulations found in gene regulatory networks and
protein signal pathways. The proposed estimation method for fanout not only
provides an experimentally efficient way for quantifying the level of
modularity in gene regulatory circuits but also helps characterize and design
module interfaces, enabling the modular construction of gene circuits.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure
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