No Arabic abstract
Across diverse biological systems -- ranging from neural networks to intracellular signaling and genetic regulatory networks -- the information about changes in the environment is frequently encoded in the full temporal dynamics of the network nodes. A pressing data-analysis challenge has thus been to efficiently estimate the amount of information that these dynamics convey from experimental data. Here we develop and evaluate decoding-based estimation methods to lower bound the mutual information about a finite set of inputs, encoded in single-cell high-dimensional time series data. For biological reaction networks governed by the chemical Master equation, we derive model-based information approximations and analytical upper bounds, against which we benchmark our proposed model-free decoding estimators. In contrast to the frequently-used k-nearest-neighbor estimator, decoding-based estimators robustly extract a large fraction of the available information from high-dimensional trajectories with a realistic number of data samples. We apply these estimators to previously published data on Erk and Ca signaling in mammalian cells and to yeast stress-response, and find that substantial amount of information about environmental state can be encoded by non-trivial response statistics even in stationary signals. We argue that these single-cell, decoding-based information estimates, rather than the commonly-used tests for significant differences between selected population response statistics, provide a proper and unbiased measure for the performance of biological signaling networks.
Stochastic simulations are one of the cornerstones of the analysis of dynamical processes on complex networks, and are often the only accessible way to explore their behavior. The development of fast algorithms is paramount to allow large-scale simulations. The Gillespie algorithm can be used for fast simulation of stochastic processes, and variants of it have been applied to simulate dynamical processes on static networks. However, its adaptation to temporal networks remains non-trivial. We here present a temporal Gillespie algorithm that solves this problem. Our method is applicable to general Poisson (constant-rate) processes on temporal networks, stochastically exact, and up to multiple orders of magnitude faster than traditional simulation schemes based on rejection sampling. We also show how it can be extended to simulate non-Markovian processes. The algorithm is easily applicable in practice, and as an illustration we detail how to simulate both Poissonian and non-Markovian models of epidemic spreading. Namely, we provide pseudocode and its implementation in C++ for simulating the paradigmatic Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible and Susceptible-Infected-Recovered models and a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model with non-constant recovery rates. For empirical networks, the temporal Gillespie algorithm is here typically from 10 to 100 times faster than rejection sampling.
The identification of time-varying textit{in situ} signals is crucial for characterizing the dynamics of quantum processes occurring in highly isolated environments. Under certain circumstances, they can be identified from time-resolved measurements via Ramsey interferometry experiments, but only with very special probe systems can the signals be explicitly read out, and a theoretical analysis is lacking on whether the measurement data are sufficient for unambiguous identification. In this paper, we formulate this problem as the invertibility of the underlying quantum input-output system, and derive the algebraic identifiability criterion and the algorithm for numerically identifying the signals. The criterion and algorithm can be applied to both closed and open quantum systems, and their effectiveness is demonstrated by numerical examples.
Quantifying the attack ratio of disease is key to epidemiological inference and Public Health planning. For multi-serotype pathogens, however, different levels of serotype-specific immunity make it difficult to assess the population at risk. In this paper we propose a Bayesian method for estimation of the attack ratio of an epidemic and the initial fraction of susceptibles using aggregated incidence data. We derive the probability distribution of the effective reproductive number, R t , and use MCMC to obtain posterior distributions of the parameters of a single-strain SIR transmission model with time-varying force of infection. Our method is showcased in a data set consisting of 18 years of dengue incidence in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We demonstrate that it is possible to learn about the initial fraction of susceptibles and the attack ratio even in the absence of serotype specific data. On the other hand, the information provided by this approach is limited, stressing the need for detailed serological surveys to characterise the distribution of serotype-specific immunity in the population.
We study the optimality conditions of information transfer in systems with memory in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime of vanishing input amplitude. We find that the optimal mutual information is represented by a maximum-variance of the signal time course, with correlation structure determined by the Fisher information matrix. We provide illustration of the method on a simple biologically-inspired model of electro-sensory neuron. Our general results apply also to the study of information transfer in single neurons subject to weak stimulation, with implications to the problem of coding efficiency in biological systems.
Cryptocurrencies return cross-predictability and technological similarity yield information on risk propagation and market segmentation. To investigate these effects, we build a time-varying network for cryptocurrencies, based on the evolution of return cross-predictability and technological similarities. We develop a dynamic covariate-assisted spectral clustering method to consistently estimate the latent community structure of cryptocurrencies network that accounts for both sets of information. We demonstrate that investors can achieve better risk diversification by investing in cryptocurrencies from different communities. A cross-sectional portfolio that implements an inter-crypto momentum trading strategy earns a 1.08% daily return. By dissecting the portfolio returns on behavioral factors, we confirm that our results are not driven by behavioral mechanisms.