scholarly journals Measuring Autonomy and Emergence via Granger Causality

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil K. Seth

Concepts of emergence and autonomy are central to artificial life and related cognitive and behavioral sciences. However, quantitative and easy-to-apply measures of these phenomena are mostly lacking. Here, I describe quantitative and practicable measures for both autonomy and emergence, based on the framework of multivariate autoregression and specifically Granger causality. G-autonomy measures the extent to which the knowing the past of a variable helps predict its future, as compared to predictions based on past states of external (environmental) variables. G-emergence measures the extent to which a process is both dependent upon and autonomous from its underlying causal factors. These measures are validated by application to agent-based models of predation (for autonomy) and flocking (for emergence). In the former, evolutionary adaptation enhances autonomy; the latter model illustrates not only emergence but also downward causation. I end with a discussion of relations among autonomy, emergence, and consciousness.

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-Heng Chen ◽  
Chia-Ling Chang ◽  
Ye-Rong Du

AbstractThis paper reviews the development of agent-based (computational) economics (ACE) from an econometrics viewpoint. The review comprises three stages, characterizing the past, the present, and the future of this development. The first two stages can be interpreted as an attempt to build the econometric foundation of ACE, and, through that, enrich its empirical content. The second stage may then invoke a reverse reflection on the possible agent-based foundation of econometrics. While ACE modeling has been applied to different branches of economics, the one, and probably the only one, which is able to provide evidence of this three-stage development is finance or financial economics. We will, therefore, focus our review only on the literature of agent-based computational finance, or, more specifically, the agent-based modeling of financial markets.


Healthcare ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 469
Author(s):  
Ali Asgary ◽  
Mahdi M. Najafabadi ◽  
Richard Karsseboom ◽  
Jianhong Wu

Several research and development teams around the world are working towards COVID-19 vaccines. As vaccines are expected to be developed and produced, preparedness and planning for mass vaccination and immunization will become an important aspect of the pandemic management. Mass vaccination has been used by public health agencies in the past and is being proposed as a viable option for COVID-19 immunization. To be able to rapidly and safely immunize a large number of people against SARS-CoV-2, different mass vaccination options are available. Drive-through facilities have been successfully used in the past for immunization against other diseases and for testing during COVID-19. In this paper we introduce a drive-through vaccination simulation tool that can be used to enhance the planning, design, operation, and feasibility and effectiveness assessment of such facilities. The simulation tool is a hybrid model that integrates discrete event and agent-based modeling techniques. The simulation outputs visually and numerically show the average processing and waiting times and the number of cars and people that can be served (throughput values) under different numbers of staff, service lanes, screening, registration, immunization, and recovery times.


2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyung-Joong Kim ◽  
Sung-Bae Cho

We review the applications of artificial life (ALife), the creation of synthetic life on computers to study, simulate, and understand living systems. The definition and features of ALife are shown by application studies. ALife application fields treated include robot control, robot manufacturing, practical robots, computer graphics, natural phenomenon modeling, entertainment, games, music, economics, Internet, information processing, industrial design, simulation software, electronics, security, data mining, and telecommunications. In order to show the status of ALife application research, this review primarily features a survey of about 180 ALife application articles rather than a selected representation of a few articles. Evolutionary computation is the most popular method for designing such applications, but recently swarm intelligence, artificial immune network, and agent-based modeling have also produced results. Applications were initially restricted to the robotics and computer graphics, but presently, many different applications in engineering areas are of interest.


2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Claridge

The long-footed potoroo (Potorous longipes) is one of the rarest and most elusive forest-dwelling mammals in Australia. Survey effort for the species over the past decade or so in south-eastern New South Wales has been driven, primarily, by predictions derived from climatic analyses using BIOCLIM. These predictions were based on known locality records of the long-footed potoroo from adjacent East Gippsland, Victoria. While they have proven useful in confirming the occurrence of the species in New South Wales, recent fortuitous records of the species from north-eastern Victoria fall well outside of the range predicted earlier by BIOCLIM. Using these new records a revised predicted range is calculated, enlarging considerably the potential geographic extent of climatically suitable habitat for the species. The results presented here highlight the limitations of BIOCLIM when given locality records of a species from only a portion of its true geographic range. I argue that less emphasis might be based on this approach to direct survey effort for the species in the future. Instead, a range of other environmental variables might be used in combination with BIOCLIM-derived outputs when selecting survey sites. In this way a more representative picture of the distribution of the species may be obtained.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Rosenthal ◽  
Dan Bar-On

Abstract Previous studies have shown that many children of former Nazi perpetrators either identify with their parents by denying their atrocities, by distancing them-selves emotionally from their parents, or by acknowledging their participation in the extermination process. Through a hermeneutical case study of the narrated life story of a Euthanasia physician's daughter, a type of strategy, which we defined as pseudo-identification with the victim, is reconstructed. The results of the analysis suggest that this is a repair strategy. Putting oneself in the role of one's parents' victim provides refuge from acknowledging possible identification with Nazism and its idols, as well as identifying oneself with the real victims of one's parents. In this case, the psychological consequences of this strategy are described: The woman still suffers from extermination anxieties which block further working through of the past. (Behavioral Sciences)


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  

The editorial team greatly appreciates the reviewers who have dedicated their considerable time and expertise to the journal’s rigorous editorial process over the past 12 months, regardless of whether the papers are finally published or not [...]


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN K. COFFEY ◽  
DUSTIN L. PENDELL ◽  
GLYNN T. TONSOR

AbstractU.S. live cattle markets have experienced dramatic shifts in marketing methods over the past two decades, changing the way live cattle prices are discovered. We identify relationships between prices of the five major live cattle marketing regions using Granger causality and directed graph analysis. The two approaches complement each other and reveal that interweek and intraweek price discovery roles for given markets differ. Evidence indicates that Colorado, though a minor market in terms of relative volume, has become an important source of interweek price information to other markets.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongqin Liu ◽  
Tandong Yao ◽  
Baiqing Xu

<p>Many studies focusing on the physical and chemical indicators of the ice core reflected the climate changes. However, only few biological indicators indicated the past climate changes which are mainly focused in biomass rather than diversity. How the biodiversity response to the climate change during the past hundred years is still unknow. Glaciers in Mt. Muztagh Ata region are influenced by the year-round westerly circulation. We firstly disclosed annual variations of bacterial community compositions in ice core over the past 130 years from Muztagh Glacier, the western Tibetan Plateau. Temporal variation in bacterial abundance was strongly controlled by DOC, TN, δ<sup>18</sup>O, Ca<sup>2+</sup>, SO<sub>4</sub><sup>2</sup><sup>−</sup>, NH<sub>4</sub><sup>+</sup> and NO<sub>3</sub><sup>−</sup>. Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Firmicutes were the three most abundant bacterial phyla, accounting for 49.3%, 21.3% and 11.0% of the total community, respectively. The abundances of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes pronouncedly increased over time throughout the entire ice core. UPGMA cluster analysis of the bacterial community composition separated the all ice core samples into two main clusters along the temporal variation. The first cluster consisted of samples from 1951 to 2000 and the second cluster contained main samples during the period of 1869-1950. The stage 1 and stage 2 bacterial community dissimilarities increased linearly with time on the basis of the Bray-Curtis distance, indicating a similar temporal–decay relationship between the stage 1 and stage 2 bacterial communities. Of all the environmental variables examined, only DOC and NH<sub>4</sub><sup>+</sup> exhibited very strong negative correlations with bacterial Chao1-richness. <sup>18</sup>O was another important variable in shaping the ice core bacterial community composition and contributed 1.6% of the total variation. Moreover, DistLM analysis indicated that the environmental variables explained more variation in the stage 1 community (20.1%) than that of the stage 2 community (19.9%).</p>


2004 ◽  
Vol 359 (1442) ◽  
pp. 295-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. D. Bennett

The Quaternary has been a period of dramatic environmental change for the past 1.8 Myr, with major shifts in distributions and abundances of terrestrial and marine organisms. The evolutionary consequences of this have been debated since the nineteenth century. However, the lack of accurate relative and absolute time–scales for evolutions and environmental change inhibited progress. We do now have an understanding of time–scales. Palaeoecology has demonstrated the individualistic nature of species' response to environmental change, but lacks a means of determining ancestry. DNA characterization of modern populations in relation to their distributions nicely complements palaeoecological results by contributing ancestry. The chance to understand how species originate and the causal factors of speciation (environmental change or otherwise) may be within reach.


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