Search

We report the existence of deterministic patterns in plots showing the relationship between the mean and the Fano factor (ratio of variance and mean) of stochastic count data. These patterns are found in a wide variety of datasets, including those from genomics, paper citations, commerce, ecology, disease outbreaks, and employment statistics. We develop a theory showing that the patterns naturally emerge when data sampled from discrete probability distributions is organised in matrix form. The theory precisely predicts the patterns and shows that they are a function of only one variable - the sample size., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures

A desirable open world recognition (OWR) system requires performing three tasks: (1) Open set recognition (OSR), i.e., classifying the known (classes seen during training) and rejecting the unknown (unseen$/$novel classes) online; (2) Grouping and labeling these unknown as novel known classes; (3) Incremental learning (IL), i.e., continual learning these novel classes and retaining the memory of old classes. Ideally, all of these steps should be automated. However, existing methods mostly assume that the second task is completely done manually. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenGCD that combines three key ideas to solve the above problems sequentially: (a) We score the origin of instances (unknown or specifically known) based on the uncertainty of the classifier's prediction; (b) For the first time, we introduce generalized category discovery (GCD) techniques in OWR to assist humans in grouping unlabeled data; (c) For the smooth execution of IL and GCD, we retain an equal number of informative exemplars for each class with diversity as the goal. Moreover, we present a new performance evaluation metric for GCD called harmonic clustering accuracy. Experiments on two standard classification benchmarks and a challenging dataset demonstrate that OpenGCD not only offers excellent compatibility but also substantially outperforms other baselines. Code: https://github.com/Fulin-Gao/OpenGCD.

Auto-regulatory feedback loops are one of the most common network motifs. A wide variety of stochastic models have been constructed to understand how the fluctuations in protein numbers in these loops are influenced by the kinetic parameters of the main biochemical steps. These models differ according to (i) which sub-cellular processes are explicitly modelled; (ii) the modelling methodology employed (discrete, continuous or hybrid); (iii) whether they can be analytically solved for the steady-state distribution of protein numbers. We discuss the assumptions and properties of the main models in the literature, summarize our current understanding of the relationship between them and highlight some of the insights gained through modelling., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Biophysical Journal

In this paper, we develop an extremum seeking control method integrated with iterative learning control to track a time-varying optimizer within finite time. The behavior of the extremum seeking system is analyzed via an approximating system - the modified Lie bracket system. The modified Lie bracket system is essentially an online integral-type iterative learning control law. The paper contributes to two fields, namely, iterative learning control and extremum seeking. First, an online integral type iterative learning control with a forgetting factor is proposed. Its convergence is analyzed via $k$-dependent (iteration- dependent) contraction mapping in a Banach space equipped with $\lambda$-norm. Second, the iterative learning extremum seeking system can be regarded as an iterative learning control with "control input disturbance." The tracking error of its modified Lie bracket system can be shown uniformly bounded in terms of iterations by selecting a sufficiently large frequency. Furthermore, it is shown that the tracking error will finally converge to a set, which is a $\lambda$-norm ball. Its center is the same with the limit solution of its corresponding "disturbance-free" system (the iterative learning control law); and its radius can be controlled by the frequency., Comment: 15 pages