The notion of entropy is widely used in modern statistical physics, thermodynamics, information theory, engineering etc. In 1948, Claude Shannon introduced his information entropy for an absolutely continuous random variable x having probability density function (pdf) p. In 1988, Constantino Tsallis introduced a generalized Shannon entropy. Tsallis entropy have found applications in various sci...

Probabilistic models for binary spike patterns provide a powerful tool for understanding the statistical dependencies in large-scale neural recordings. Maximum entropy (or “maxent”) models, which seek to explain dependencies in terms of low-order interactions between neurons, have enjoyed remarkable success in modeling such patterns, particularly for small groups of neurons. However, these mode...

Climate warming is one of the most important threats to biodiversity. Ectothermic organisms such as amphibians and reptiles are especially vulnerable as climatic conditions affect them directly. Ecological niche models (ENMs) are increasingly popular in ecological studies, but several drawbacks exist, including the limited ability to account for the dispersal potential of the species. In this s...

BACKGROUND Anopheles albimanus is among the most important vectors of human malaria in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean Basin (M-C). Here, we use topographic data and 1950-2000 climate (near present), and future climate (2080) layers obtained from general circulation models (GCMs) to project the probability of the species' presence, p(s), using the species distribution model MaxEnt. RESULTS The ...

The entropy maximum approach (Maxent) was developed as a minimization of the subjective uncertainty measured by the Boltzmann–Gibbs–Shannon entropy. Many new entropies have been invented in the second half of the 20th century. Now there exists a rich choice of entropies for fitting needs. This diversity of entropies gave rise to a Maxent ‘‘anarchism’’. The Maxent approach is now the conditional...

We used correlative models with species occurrence points, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) vegetation indices, and topo-climatic predictors to map the current distribution and potential habitat of invasive Prosopis juliflora in Afar, Ethiopia. Time-series of MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Indices (EVI) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Indices (NDVI) with 250 m2 spatial reso...

1. Two dominant drivers of species distributions are climate and habitat, both of which are changing rapidly. Understanding the relative importance of variables that can control distributions is critical, especially for invasive species that may spread rapidly and have strong effects on ecosystems. 2. Here, we examine the relative importance of climate and habitat variables in controlling the d...

Statistical modeling of presence-only data has attracted much recent attention in the ecological literature, leading to a proliferation of methods, including the inhomogeneous poisson process (IPP) model [15], maximum entropy (Maxent) modeling of species distributions [12] [9] [10], and logistic regression models. Several recent articles have shown the close relationships between these methods ...

We consider the problem of estimating an unknown probability distribution from samples using the principle of maximum entropy (maxent). To alleviate overfitting with a very large number of features, we propose applying the maxent principle with relaxed constraints on the expectations of the features. By convex duality, this turns out to be equivalent to finding the Gibbs distribution minimizing...