scholarly journals Heavy-tailed distributions in a stochastic gene autoregulation model

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavol Bokes

Synthesis of gene products in bursts of multiple molecular copies is an important source of gene expression variability. This paper studies large deviations in a Markovian drift--jump process that combines exponentially distributed bursts with deterministic degradation. Large deviations occur as a cumulative effect of many bursts (as in diffusion) or, if the model includes negative feedback in burst size, in a single big jump. The latter possibility requires a modification in the WKB solution in the tail region. The main result of the paper is the construction, via a modified WKB scheme, of matched asymptotic approximations to the stationary distribution of the drift--jump process. The stationary distribution possesses a heavier tail than predicted by a routine application of the scheme.

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (102) ◽  
pp. 20140884 ◽  
Author(s):  
Violet Mwaffo ◽  
Ross P. Anderson ◽  
Sachit Butail ◽  
Maurizio Porfiri

Zebrafish are gaining momentum as a laboratory animal species for the investigation of several functional and dysfunctional biological processes. Mathematical models of zebrafish behaviour are expected to considerably aid in the design of hypothesis-driven studies by enabling preliminary in silico tests that can be used to infer possible experimental outcomes without the use of zebrafish. This study is motivated by observations of sudden, drastic changes in zebrafish locomotion in the form of large deviations in turn rate. We demonstrate that such deviations can be captured through a stochastic mean reverting jump diffusion model, a process that is commonly used in financial engineering to describe large changes in the price of an asset. The jump process-based model is validated on trajectory data of adult subjects swimming in a shallow circular tank obtained from an overhead camera. Through statistical comparison of the empirical distribution of the turn rate against theoretical predictions, we demonstrate the feasibility of describing zebrafish as a jump persistent turning walker. The critical role of the jump term is assessed through comparison with a simplified mean reversion diffusion model, which does not allow for describing the heavy-tailed distributions observed in the fish turn rate.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-671 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Mariani ◽  
Lorenzo Zambotti

Abstract A large deviations principle is established for the joint law of the empirical measure and the flow measure of a Markov renewal process on a finite graph. We do not assume any bound on the arrival times, allowing heavy-tailed distributions. In particular, the rate function is in general degenerate (it has a nontrivial set of zeros) and not strictly convex. These features show a behaviour highly different from what one may guess with a heuristic Donsker‒Varadhan analysis of the problem.


Author(s):  
Stefan Thurner ◽  
Rudolf Hanel ◽  
Peter Klimekl

Phenomena, systems, and processes are rarely purely deterministic, but contain stochastic,probabilistic, or random components. For that reason, a probabilistic descriptionof most phenomena is necessary. Probability theory provides us with the tools for thistask. Here, we provide a crash course on the most important notions of probabilityand random processes, such as odds, probability, expectation, variance, and so on. Wedescribe the most elementary stochastic event—the trial—and develop the notion of urnmodels. We discuss basic facts about random variables and the elementary operationsthat can be performed on them. We learn how to compose simple stochastic processesfrom elementary stochastic events, and discuss random processes as temporal sequencesof trials, such as Bernoulli and Markov processes. We touch upon the basic logic ofBayesian reasoning. We discuss a number of classical distribution functions, includingpower laws and other fat- or heavy-tailed distributions.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Mei Ling Huang ◽  
Xiang Raney-Yan

The high quantile estimation of heavy tailed distributions has many important applications. There are theoretical difficulties in studying heavy tailed distributions since they often have infinite moments. There are also bias issues with the existing methods of confidence intervals (CIs) of high quantiles. This paper proposes a new estimator for high quantiles based on the geometric mean. The new estimator has good asymptotic properties as well as it provides a computational algorithm for estimating confidence intervals of high quantiles. The new estimator avoids difficulties, improves efficiency and reduces bias. Comparisons of efficiencies and biases of the new estimator relative to existing estimators are studied. The theoretical are confirmed through Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, the applications on two real-world examples are provided.


Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Haoyu Niu ◽  
Jiamin Wei ◽  
YangQuan Chen

Stochastic Configuration Network (SCN) has a powerful capability for regression and classification analysis. Traditionally, it is quite challenging to correctly determine an appropriate architecture for a neural network so that the trained model can achieve excellent performance for both learning and generalization. Compared with the known randomized learning algorithms for single hidden layer feed-forward neural networks, such as Randomized Radial Basis Function (RBF) Networks and Random Vector Functional-link (RVFL), the SCN randomly assigns the input weights and biases of the hidden nodes in a supervisory mechanism. Since the parameters in the hidden layers are randomly generated in uniform distribution, hypothetically, there is optimal randomness. Heavy-tailed distribution has shown optimal randomness in an unknown environment for finding some targets. Therefore, in this research, the authors used heavy-tailed distributions to randomly initialize weights and biases to see if the new SCN models can achieve better performance than the original SCN. Heavy-tailed distributions, such as Lévy distribution, Cauchy distribution, and Weibull distribution, have been used. Since some mixed distributions show heavy-tailed properties, the mixed Gaussian and Laplace distributions were also studied in this research work. Experimental results showed improved performance for SCN with heavy-tailed distributions. For the regression model, SCN-Lévy, SCN-Mixture, SCN-Cauchy, and SCN-Weibull used less hidden nodes to achieve similar performance with SCN. For the classification model, SCN-Mixture, SCN-Lévy, and SCN-Cauchy have higher test accuracy of 91.5%, 91.7% and 92.4%, respectively. Both are higher than the test accuracy of the original SCN.


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