3,376 research outputs found
Patterning the insect eye: from stochastic to deterministic mechanisms
While most processes in biology are highly deterministic, stochastic
mechanisms are sometimes used to increase cellular diversity, such as in the
specification of sensory receptors. In the human and Drosophila eye,
photoreceptors sensitive to various wavelengths of light are distributed
randomly across the retina. Mechanisms that underlie stochastic cell fate
specification have been analysed in detail in the Drosophila retina. In
contrast, the retinas of another group of dipteran flies exhibit highly ordered
patterns. Species in the Dolichopodidae, the "long-legged" flies, have regular
alternating columns of two types of ommatidia (unit eyes), each producing
corneal lenses of different colours. Individual flies sometimes exhibit
perturbations of this orderly pattern, with "mistakes" producing changes in
pattern that can propagate across the entire eye, suggesting that the
underlying developmental mechanisms follow local, cellular-automaton-like
rules. We hypothesize that the regulatory circuitry patterning the eye is
largely conserved among flies such that the difference between the Drosophila
and Dolichopodidae eyes should be explicable in terms of relative interaction
strengths, rather than requiring a rewiring of the regulatory network. We
present a simple stochastic model which, among its other predictions, is
capable of explaining both the random Drosophila eye and the ordered, striped
pattern of Dolichopodidae.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure
Conservation of pattern as a tool for inference on spatial snapshots in ecological data
As climate change and other anthropogenic factors increase the uncertainty of vegetation ecosystem persistence, the ability to rapidly assess their dynamics is paramount. Vegetation and sessile communities form a variety of striking regular spatial patterns such as stripes, spots and labyrinths, that have been used as indicators of ecosystem current state, through qualitative analysis of simple models. Here we describe a new method for rigorous quantitative estimation of biological parameters from a single spatial snapshot. We formulate a synthetic likelihood through consideration of the expected change in the correlation structure of the spatial pattern. This then allows Bayesian inference to be performed on the model parameters, which includes providing parameter uncertainty. The method was validated against simulated data and then applied to real data in the form of aerial photographs of seagrass banding. The inferred parameters were found to be able to reproduce similar patterns to those observed and able to detect strength of spatial competition, competition-induced mortality and the local range of reproduction. This technique points to a way of performing rapid inference of spatial competition and ecological stability from a single spatial snapshots of sessile communities
Data-driven Flood Emulation: Speeding up Urban Flood Predictions by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Computational complexity has been the bottleneck of applying physically-based
simulations on large urban areas with high spatial resolution for efficient and
systematic flooding analyses and risk assessments. To address this issue of
long computational time, this paper proposes that the prediction of maximum
water depth rasters can be considered as an image-to-image translation problem
where the results are generated from input elevation rasters using the
information learned from data rather than by conducting simulations, which can
significantly accelerate the prediction process. The proposed approach was
implemented by a deep convolutional neural network trained on flood simulation
data of 18 designed hyetographs on three selected catchments. Multiple tests
with both designed and real rainfall events were performed and the results show
that the flood predictions by neural network uses only 0.5 % of time comparing
with physically-based approaches, with promising accuracy and ability of
generalizations. The proposed neural network can also potentially be applied to
different but relevant problems including flood predictions for urban layout
planning
An Algorithm for Pattern Discovery in Time Series
We present a new algorithm for discovering patterns in time series and other
sequential data. We exhibit a reliable procedure for building the minimal set
of hidden, Markovian states that is statistically capable of producing the
behavior exhibited in the data -- the underlying process's causal states.
Unlike conventional methods for fitting hidden Markov models (HMMs) to data,
our algorithm makes no assumptions about the process's causal architecture (the
number of hidden states and their transition structure), but rather infers it
from the data. It starts with assumptions of minimal structure and introduces
complexity only when the data demand it. Moreover, the causal states it infers
have important predictive optimality properties that conventional HMM states
lack. We introduce the algorithm, review the theory behind it, prove its
asymptotic reliability, use large deviation theory to estimate its rate of
convergence, and compare it to other algorithms which also construct HMMs from
data. We also illustrate its behavior on an example process, and report
selected numerical results from an implementation.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures; 5 tables;
http://www.santafe.edu/projects/CompMech Added discussion of algorithm
parameters; improved treatment of convergence and time complexity; added
comparison to older method
A Spatial Agent-Based Model of N-Person Prisoner's Dilemma Cooperation in a Socio-Geographic Community
The purpose of this paper is to present a spatial agent-based model of N-person prisoner's dilemma that is designed to simulate the collective communication and cooperation within a socio-geographic community. Based on a tight coupling of REPAST and a vector Geographic Information System, the model simulates the emergence of cooperation from the mobility behaviors and interaction strategies of citizen agents. To approximate human behavior, the agents are set as stochastic learning automata with Pavlovian personalities and attitudes. A review of the theory of the standard prisoner's dilemma, the iterated prisoner's dilemma, and the N-person prisoner's dilemma is given as well as an overview of the generic architecture of the agent-based model. The capabilities of the spatial N-person prisoner's dilemma component are demonstrated with several scenario simulation runs for varied initial cooperation percentages and mobility dynamics. Experimental results revealed that agent mobility and context preservation bring qualitatively different effects to the evolution of cooperative behavior in an analyzed spatial environment.Agent Based Modeling, Cooperation, Prisoners Dilemma, Spatial Interaction Model, Spatially Structured Social Dilemma, Geographic Information Systems
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