Bergmann's rule is a widely-accepted biogeographic rule stating that individuals within a species are smaller in warmer environments. While there are many single-species studies and integrative reviews documenting this pattern, a data-intensive approach has not been used yet to determine the generality of this pattern. We assessed the strength and direction of the intraspecific relationship bet...

When the diminutive skeleton of Homo floresiensis was found on the Indonesian island of Flores, it was interpreted as an island dwarf, conforming to the 'island rule' that large animals evolve smaller size on islands, but small animals tend to get larger. However, previous studies of the island rule have not included primates, so the extent to which insular primate populations undergo size chan...

this paper considers the automatic design of fuzzy rule-basedclassification systems based on labeled data. the classification performance andinterpretability are of major importance in these systems. in this paper, weutilize the distribution of training patterns in decision subspace of each fuzzyrule to improve its initially assigned certainty grade (i.e. rule weight). ourapproach uses a punish...

A major macroevolutionary question concerns how long-term patterns of body-size evolution are underpinned by smaller scale processes along lineages. One outstanding long-term transition is the replacement of basal therapsids (stem-group mammals) by archosauromorphs, including dinosaurs, as the dominant large-bodied terrestrial fauna during the Triassic (approx. 252-201 million years ago). This ...

Michigan-style learning classifier systems have availed themselves as a promising modeling and data mining strategy for bioinformaticists seeking to connect predictive variables with disease phenotypes. The resulting ‘model’ learned by these algorithms is comprised of an entire population of rules, some of which will inevitably be redundant or poor predictors. Rule compaction is a post-processi...

It has often been noted that most of the major world religions espouse a version of the “golden rule.” In this paper we consider the cultural evolution of such a doctrine, where the responsibility to act altruistically towards others applies universally, not just to other members of the same society. Using a game-theoretical model, we find that societies over a critical size benefit from adopti...

Agents vote to choose a fair mixture of public outcomes; each agent likes or dislikes each outcome. We discuss three outstanding voting rules. The Conditional Utilitarian rule, a variant of the random dictator, is Strategyproof and guarantees to any group of like-minded agents an influence proportional to its size. It is easier to compute and more efficient than the familiar Random Priority rul...

Currently known sequent systems for propositional linear time temporal logic either include a cut rule in some form or an infinitary rule, which is a rule with infinitely many premises. We strengthen the infinitary rule to require only a finite number of premises and show that this modification preserves soundness. This way we obtain a finitary cut-free sequent system which almost fulfills the ...

We define an optimal class association rule set to be the minimum rule set with the same predictive power of the complete class association rule set. Using this rule set instead of the complete class association rule set we can avoid redundant computation that would otherwise be required for mining predictive association rules and hence improve the efficiency of the mining process significantly...