Modelling Chemistry

Tshitoyan et al. have a paper out that uses NLP, specifically word2vec, to grope towards predictive chemistry. They analyze a corpus of a the abstracts of a few million papers over the previous century with a vocabulary of half a million words. They embed the representation of the words in Read more…

Superstatistics, Biodiversity and All That

Rominger et al. (doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat0122 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/6/eaat0122 , open access ) have come up with an astonishingly simple explanation for the distributions of fluctuation in biodiversity. First some definitions. The Phanerozoic is the last half billion years (actually 540 MYr to present.) This work deals with marine invertebrate species during the Read more…

Battling Toward Truth

Generative Adversarial Networks have features of legal systems of some countries. There is a decision process (the “law”) that reaches a judgement on conflicting interests. The law evolves to address perceived deficiency, and adversaries devise cleverer ways around it. For example, let’s say you write a program (the law) that Read more…

Learning to Play

Where was this when we were grad students absconding from labs to watch March Madness ? Sicilia et al. have a charming paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08081 ) on machine learning for basketball. They begin with an annotated database of player and ball positions at 1/25 second resolution for 650 NBA games Read more…

EDM and Predictions

An earlier post on Empirical Dynamics and Information Flow, https://clarodatascience.com/2018/06/17/dynamical-systems-information-flow-and-causality/ showed a technique to reconstruct attractors in phase space from measurement of a single coordinate of trajectories orbiting the attractor. Briefly, we construct lagged vectors from one coordinate time series, identify the nearest neighbours for a candidate vector, find their Read more…