Multi-Agent Complex Systems and Many-Body Physics

Multi-agent complex systems comprising populations of decision-making particles, have many potential applications across the biological, informational and social sciences. We show that the time-averaged dynamics in such systems bear a striking resemblance to conventional many-body physics. For the specific example of the Minority Game, this analogy enables us to obtain analytic expressions which are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.Comment: Accepted for publication in Europhysics Letter

Testing equality of variances in the analysis of repeated measurements

The problem of comparing the precisions of two instruments using repeated measurements can be cast as an extension of the Pitman-Morgan problem of testing equality of variances of a bivariate normal distribution. Hawkins (1981) decomposes the hypothesis of equal variances in this model into two subhypotheses for which simple tests exist. For the overall hypothesis he proposes to combine the tests of the subhypotheses using Fisher's method and empirically compares the component tests and their combination with the likelihood ratio test. In this paper an attempt is made to resolve some discrepancies and puzzling conclusions in Hawkins's study and to propose simple modifications.\ud \ud The new tests are compared to the tests discussed by Hawkins and to each other both in terms of the finite sample power (estimated by Monte Carlo simulation) and theoretically in terms of asymptotic relative efficiencies

Predictability of large future changes in a competitive evolving population

The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a generic multi-agent population competing for a limited resource, and find that the level of predictability actually increases prior to a large change. These large changes hence arise as a predictable consequence of information encoded in the system's global state.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure