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Why only humans sleepwalk

Popular Science

It's a trait evolution forgot to get rid of. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A colorized film still from the 1931 German film'Emil and the Detectives' shows a man sleepwalking. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .


Characterization and Learning of Causal Graphs from Hard Interventions

Neural Information Processing Systems

A fundamental challenge in the empirical sciences involves uncovering causal structure through observation and experimentation. Causal discovery entails linking the conditional independence (CI) invariances in observational data to their corresponding graphical constraints via d-separation. In this paper, we consider a general setting where we have access to data from multiple experimental distributions resulting from hard interventions, as well as potentially from an observational distribution. By comparing different interventional distributions, we propose a set of graphical constraints that are fundamentally linked to Pearl's do-calculus within the framework of hard interventions. These graphical constraints associate each graphical structure with a set of interventional distributions that are consistent with the rules of do-calculus. We characterize the interventional equivalence class of causal graphs with latent variables and introduce a graphical representation that can be used to determine whether two causal graphs are interventionally equivalent, i.e., whether they are associated with the same family of hard interventional distributions, where the elements of the family are indistinguishable using the invariances from do-calculus. We also propose a learning algorithm to integrate multiple datasets from hard interventions, introducing new orientation rules. The learning objective is a tuple of augmented graphs which entails a set of causal graphs. We also prove the soundness of the proposed algorithm.



Supplementary Material: Iterative Causal Discovery in the Possible Presence of Latent Confounders and Selection Bias

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this section we provide a detailed proof for the correctness and completeness of the ICD algorithm. For easier referencing we describe ICD in Algorithm 1, and describe the ICD-Sep conditions. A set Zis a subset of ICD-Sep(A,B) given r {0,...,|O| 2}, if and only if 1. |Z|= r, 2. Z Z, there exists a PDS-path ΠB(A,Z) such that, (a) |ΠB(A,Z)| r and (b) every node on ΠB(A,Z) is in Z, and 3. Z Z, node Z is a possible ancestor of Aor B (not a necessary condition). Denote A,B a pair of nodes from O that are connected in G and disconnected in D, and such that Ais not an ancestor of B in D. If A B |[Z0] S, where Z0 O is a minimal separating set having size n+ 1, then there exists a subset Z O having the same size of n+ 1 such that that A B |Z S, and for every node Z Zthere exists a PDS-path ΠB(A,Z) in G, such that every node V on the PDS-path is also in Z. Proof. It was previously shown that a minimal separating set for Aand B, where Ais not an ancestor of B, is a subset of D-Sep(A,B) (Spirtes et al., 2000, page 134 and Theorem 6.2; Spirtes et al., 1999).


AGang of Adversarial Bandits

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider running multiple instances of multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems in parallel. A main motivation for this study are online recommendation systems, in which each of N users is associated with a MAB problem and the goal is to exploit users' similarity in order to learn users' preferences to K items more efficiently. We consider the adversarial MAB setting, whereby an adversary is free to choose which user and which loss to present to the learner during the learning process. Users are in a social network and the learner is aided by a-priori knowledge of the strengths of the social links between all pairs of users. It is assumed that if the social link between two users is strong then they tend to share the same action.


65-foot-long octopuses ruled ancient oceans

Popular Science

The kraken-like apex predators were smart, too. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The fossils prove octopuses existed at least 5 million years earlier than originally thought. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Around 100 million years ago, real kraken-like creatures stalked Earth's prehistoric oceans.


Infinite Hidden Semi-Markov Modulated Interaction Point Process

Neural Information Processing Systems

The correlation between events is ubiquitous and important for temporal events modelling. In many cases, the correlation exists between not only events' emitted observations, but also their arrival times. State space models (e.g., hidden Markov model) and stochastic interaction point process models (e.g., Hawkes process) have been studied extensively yet separately for the two types of correlations in the past. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach that considers both types of correlations via unifying and generalizing the hidden semiMarkov model and interaction point process model. The proposed approach can simultaneously model both the observations and arrival times of temporal events, and automatically determine the number of latent states from data.


Do any bugs live in the ocean? Short answer: Not really.

Popular Science

Do any bugs live in the ocean? Crustaceans and insects share a common ancestor, but bugs are happier on land. Water striders are the only insect that live entirely on the ocean's surface. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By some estimates, insects make up 80 percent of named animal species.


An odd-nosed crocodile ate our prehistoric ancestors

Popular Science

'Lucy' probably needed to watch her back. Researchers led by the University of Iowa have described and named a new crocodile species that roamed a region in Africa more than 3 million years ago. The species is named Lucy's hunter, because it overlapped with the famed Lucy and her hominin kin and would have hunted them. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Humans have contended with crocodiles for a long time.


Bizarro salamander ancestor was an evolutionary oddball

Popular Science

Paleontologists say'Tanyka amnicola' had a jawbone that's a real head-scratcher. Tanyka amnicola lived in prehistoric rivers around 275 million years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There are quite a few animals considered "living fossils" in today's world. Once thought extinct, the prehistoric coelacanth has continuously swam through Earth's oceans since the time of the dinosaurs.