No Arabic abstract
The characterization of diffusion processes is a keystone in our understanding of a variety of physical phenomena. Many of these deviate from Brownian motion, giving rise to anomalous diffusion. Various theoretical models exists nowadays to describe such processes, but their application to experimental setups is often challenging, due to the stochastic nature of the phenomena and the difficulty to harness reliable data. The latter often consists on short and noisy trajectories, which are hard to characterize with usual statistical approaches. In recent years, we have witnessed an impressive effort to bridge theory and experiments by means of supervised machine learning techniques, with astonishing results. In this work, we explore the use of unsupervised methods in anomalous diffusion data. We show that the main diffusion characteristics can be learnt without the need of any labelling of the data. We use such method to discriminate between anomalous diffusion models and extract their physical parameters. Moreover, we explore the feasibility of finding novel types of diffusion, in this case represented by compositions of existing diffusion models. At last, we showcase the use of the method in experimental data and demonstrate its advantages for cases where supervised learning is not applicable.
Anomalous diffusion, manifest as a nonlinear temporal evolution of the position mean square displacement, and/or non-Gaussian features of the position statistics, is prevalent in biological transport processes. Likewise, collective behavior is often observed to emerge spontaneously from the mutual interactions between constituent motile units in biological systems. Examples where these phenomena can be observed simultaneously have been identified in recent experiments on bird flocks, fish schools and bacterial swarms. These results pose an intriguing question, which cannot be resolved by existing theories of active matter: How is the collective motion of these systems affected by the anomalous diffusion of the constituent units? Here, we answer this question for a microscopic model of active Levy matter -- a collection of active particles that perform superdiffusion akin to a Levy flight and interact by promoting polar alignment of their orientations. We present in details the derivation of the hydrodynamic equations of motion of the model, obtain from these equations the criteria for a disordered or ordered state, and apply linear stability analysis on these states at the onset of collective motion. Our analysis reveals that the disorder-order phase transition in active Levy matter is critical, in contrast to ordinary active fluids where the phase transition is, instead, first-order. Correspondingly, we estimate the critical exponents of the transition by finite size scaling analysis and use these numerical estimates to relate our findings to known universality classes. These results highlight the novel physics exhibited by active matter integrating both anomalous diffusive single-particle motility and inter-particle interactions.
Modeling the joint distribution of high-dimensional data is a central task in unsupervised machine learning. In recent years, many interests have been attracted to developing learning models based on tensor networks, which have advantages of theoretical understandings of the expressive power using entanglement properties, and as a bridge connecting the classical computation and the quantum computation. Despite the great potential, however, existing tensor-network-based unsupervised models only work as a proof of principle, as their performances are much worse than the standard models such as the restricted Boltzmann machines and neural networks. In this work, we present the Autoregressive Matrix Product States (AMPS), a tensor-network-based model combining the matrix product states from quantum many-body physics and the autoregressive models from machine learning. The model enjoys exact calculation of normalized probability and unbiased sampling, as well as a clear theoretical understanding of expressive power. We demonstrate the performance of our model using two applications, the generative modeling on synthetic and real-world data, and the reinforcement learning in statistical physics. Using extensive numerical experiments, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing tensor-network-based models and the restricted Boltzmann machines, and is competitive with the state-of-the-art neural network models.
Recent investigations call attention to the dynamics of anomalous diffusion and its connection with basic principles of statistical mechanics. We present here a short review of those ideas and their implications.
A recent paper [M. H. Lee, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 190601 (2007)] has called attention to the fact that irreversibility is a broader concept than ergodicity, and that therefore the Khinchin theorem [A. I. Khinchin, Mathematical Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (Dover, New York) 1949] may fail in some systems. In this Letter we show that for all ranges of normal and anomalous diffusion described by a Generalized Langevin Equation the Khinchin theorem holds.
We address this work to investigate some statistical properties of symbolic sequences generated by a numerical procedure in which the symbols are repeated following a power law probability density. In this analysis, we consider that the sum of n symbols represents the position of a particle in erratic movement. This approach revealed a rich diffusive scenario characterized by non-Gaussian distributions and, depending on the power law exponent and also on the procedure used to build the walker, we may have superdiffusion, subdiffusion or usual diffusion. Additionally, we use the continuous-time random walk framework to compare with the numerical data, finding a good agreement. Because of its simplicity and flexibility, this model can be a candidate to describe real systems governed by power laws probabilities densities.