An efficient and useful representation for an object viewed from different positions is in terms of its instantiation parameters. We show how the Minimum Description Length principle (MDL) can be used to train the hidden units of a neural network to develop a population code for the instantiation parameters of an object in an image. Each hidden unit has a location in a low-dimensional implicit ...

background: world health organization report in 2014 indicates a considerable range of alcohol consumption across the world which had a growing trend during last 5 years. a study on 5,231 students in 57 universities has shown that alcohol consumption became more common than other drugs, and alcohol is in the first rank for repeated usage. in another study in 2010, the prevalence of alcohol use ...

This paper uses Markov chains to analyze the search quality of a bounding case of parallel genetic algorithms with multiple populations. In the bounding case considered here, each population exchanges individuals with all the others. First, the migration rate is set to the maximum value possible , and later the analysis is reened to consider lower migration rates. In the algorithm examined by t...

Weekly abundances of 2 salp populations (Salpa fusiformis and Thalia democratica) were determined for the period from 1967 to 1990 at a coastal station in the Western Mediterranean using a discrete abundance scale. A previous analysis modeled these data as a Markov chain with ordered states and found a significant effect of stratification on the Markov transition probabilities. An alternative a...

All policies aimed at improving human well-being need to be aware of the fact that there is inequality/heterogeneity within human populations. This population heterogeneity can be partly captured in terms of relevant observable characteristics such as age, gender, and level of education. But there always remains some hidden heterogeneity. While it seems to be trivial knowledge that not all peop...

Finite mixtures are widely used in applications to model data coming from different populations. Let X be the latent random variable whose value is the label of the population the observation comes from, and let Y be the observed random variable. With finitely many populations, X takes values in {1, . . . , k} for some fixed integer k, and conditionally to X = j, Y has distribution μj. Here, μ1...

Recent evidence suggests that cells employ functionally asymmetric partitioning schemes in division to cope with aging. We explore various schemes in silico, with a stochastic model of Escherichia coli that includes gene expression, non-functional proteins generation, aggregation and polar retention, and molecule partitioning in division. The model is implemented in SGNS2, which allows stochast...

In this review paper we consider physiologically structured population models that have been widely studied and employed in the literature to model the dynamics of a wide variety of populations. However in a number of cases these have been found inadequate to describe some phenomena arising in certain real-world applications such as dispersion in the structure variables due to growth uncertaint...

Two conceptually different approaches to incorporate growth uncertainty into sizestructured population models have recently been investigated. One entails imposing a probabilistic structure on all the possible growth rates across the entire population, which results in a growth rate distribution model. The other involves formulating growth as a Markov stochastic diffusion process, which leads t...