Species distribution models should provide conservation practioners with estimates of the spatial distributions of species requiring attention. These species are often rare and have limited known occurrences, posing challenges for creating accurate species distribution models. We tested four modeling methods (Bioclim, Domain, GARP, and Maxent) across 18 species with different levels of ecologic...

Is Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) a physical principle? In this paper I tentatively suggest it is not, on the basis that MEP is equivalent to Jaynes’ Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) inference algorithm that passively translates physical assumptions into macroscopic predictions, as applied to non-equilibrium systems. MaxEnt itself has no physical content; disagreement between MaxEnt predictions and e...

An often used methodology for reasoning with probabilistic conditional knowledge bases is provided by the principle of maximum entropy (so-called MaxEnt principle) that realises an idea of informational economy. In this paper we exploit the fact that MaxEnt distributions can be computed by solving nonlinear equation systems that reflect the conditional logical structure of these distributions. ...

In this work, we are concerned with a coarse grained semantic analysis over sparse data, which labels all nouns with a set of semantic categories. To get the benefit of unlabeled data, we propose a bootstrapping framework with Maximum Entropy modeling (MaxEnt) as the statistical learning component. During the iterative tagging process, unlabeled data is used not only for better statistical esti...

A long standing mystery in using Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) is how to deal with constraints whose values are uncertain. This situation arises when constraint values are estimated from data, because of finite sample sizes. One approach to this probiem, advocated by E.T. Jaynes [1], is to igriore this uncertainty, and treat the empirically observed values as exact. We refer to this as the classic M...

Sanov’s Theorem and the Conditional Limit Theorem (CoLT) are established for a multicolor Pólya Eggenberger urn sampling scheme, giving the Pólya divergence and the Pólya extension to the Maximum Relative Entropy (MaxEnt) method. Pólya MaxEnt includes the standard MaxEnt as a special case. The universality of standard MaxEnt advocated by an axiomatic approach to inference for inverse problems i...

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...

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...

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...