Marital infidelity is usually examined solely in terms of strategies of men and women, with an emphasis
on the enhanced payoff for male infidelity (provided he can get away with it). What are not clear are the
strategies used, in terms of how often to engage in extra-marital affairs. It has been proposed that female
strategies are governed by a "decision" to maximize the genetic diversity of her offspring, in order to better
guarantee that at least some will survive against a common pathogen. This strategy would then impact on the
strategies and diversity of pathogens. I make a number of predictions about both strategies and the genetic
diversity of humans and pathogens, couched in game-theoretic terms. These predictions are then compared
with the existing evidence on the strategies used by women and also in terms of the genetic diversity of human
populations.
This paper investigates the automated detection of a patient's breathing rate and heart rate from their skin conductivity as well as sleep stage scoring and breathing event detection from their EEG. The software developed for these tasks is tested on data sets obtained from the sleep disorders unit at the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital. The sleep scoring and breathing event detection tasks used neural networks to achieve signal classification. The Fourier transform and the Higuchi fractal dimension were used to extract features for input to the neural network. The filtered skin conductivity appeared visually to bear a similarity to the breathing and heart rate signal, but a more detailed evaluation showed the relation was not consistent. Sleep stage classification was achieved with and accuracy of around 65% with some stages being accurately scored and others poorly scored. The two breathing events hypopnea and apnea were scored with varying degrees of accuracy with the highest scores being around 75% and 30%.
The trade-off between pleiotropy and redundancy in telecommunications networks is analyzed in this paper. They are optimized to reduce installation costs and propagation delays. Pleiotropy of a server in a telecommunications network is defined as the number of clients and servers that it can service whilst redundancy is described as the number of servers servicing a client. Telecommunications networks containing many servers with large pleiotropy are cost-effective but vulnerable to network failures and attacks. Conversely, those networks containing many servers with high redundancy are reliable but costly. Several key issues regarding the choice of cost functions and techniques in evolutionary computation (such as the modeling of Darwinian evolution, and mutualism and commensalism) will be discussed, and a future research agenda is outlined. Experimental results indicate that the pleiotropy of servers in the optimum network does improve, whilst the redundancy of clients do not vary significantly, as expected, with evolving networks. This is due to the controlled evolution of networks that is modeled by the steady-state genetic algorithm; changes in telecommunications networks that occur drastically over a very short period of time are rare.
Authorship attribution has a range of applications in a growing number of fields such as forensic evidence, plagiarism detection, email filtering, and web information management. In this study, three attribution techniques are extended, tested on a corpus of English texts, and applied to a book in the New Testament of disputed authorship. The word recurrence interval based method compares standard deviations of the number of words between successive occurrences of a keyword both graphically and with chi-squared tests. The trigram Markov method compares the probabilities of the occurrence of words conditional on the preceding two words to determine the similarity between texts. The third method extracts stylometric measures such as the frequency of occurrence of function words and from these constructs text classification models using multiple discriminant analysis. The effectiveness of these techniques is compared. The accuracy of the results obtained by some of these extended methods is higher than many of the current state of the art approaches. Statistical evidence is presented about the authorship of the selected book from the New Testament.
This work explores emergent behaviour in a complex adaptive system, specifically an agent-based battlefield simulation model. We explore the changes in agent attribute sets through the use of genetic algorithms over a series of battles, with performance measured by a number of different statistics including number of casualties, number of enemy agents killed, and success rate at "capturing the flag". The agents' capabilities include (but are not limited to) maneuverability upon the battlefield, formulating, sending, receiving and acting upon messages and attacking enemy agents.
We explore a variety of network models describing transmission across a network. In particular we focus on transmission across composite networks, or "networks of networks", in which a finite number of networked objects are then themselves connected together into a network. In a disease context we introduce two interrelated viruses to hosts on a network, to model the infection of hosts in a classroom situation, with high rates of infection within a classroom, and lower rates of infection between classrooms. The hosts can be either susceptible to infection, infected, or recovering from each virus. During the infection stage and recovery stage there is some level of cross-immunity to related viruses. We explore the effects of immunizing sections of the community on transmission through social networks. In a stock market context we introduce memes, or virus-like ideas into a virtual agent-based model of a stock exchange. By varying the parameters of the individual traders and the way in which they are connected we are able to show emergent behaviour, including boom and bust cycles.
Electroencephalograph (EEG) analysis enables the dynamic behavior of the brain to be examined. If the behavior is nonlinear then
nonlinear tools can be used to glean information on brain behavior, and aid in the diagnosis of sleep abnormalities such as obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). In this paper the sleep EEGs of a set of normal children and children with mild OSAS are evaluated for nonlinear brain behaviour. We found that there were differences in the nonlinearity of the brain behaviour between different sleep stages, and between the two groups of children.
We explore emergent behavior in an agent-based model of a complex system. The particular complex system we consider is a battlefield simulation. These agents are modeled in the RePast agent-based modeling environment. We will explore how agents of various capabilities and differing task sets affect the outcome of a battle. The capabilities of these agents include, but are not limited to, the ability to maneuver on the battlefield, receive and understand messages, formulate and send messages and attack enemy agents.
This paper explores the authorship of the Letter to the Hebrews using a number of different measures of relationship between different texts of the New Testament. The methods used in the study include file zipping and compression techniques, prediction by the partial matching technique and the word recurrence interval technique. The long term motivation is that the techniques employed in this study may find applicability in future generation web search engines, email authorship identification, detection of plagiarism and terrorist email traffic filtration.
Gene networks are composed of many different interacting genes and gene products (RNAs and proteins). They can be thought of as switching regions in n-dimensional space or as mass-balanced signaling networks. Both approaches allow for describing gene networks with the limited quantitative or even qualitative data available. We show how these approaches can be used in modeling the apoptosis gene network that has a vital role in tumor development. The open question is whether engineering changes to this network could be used as a possible cancer treatment.
p53 is an important gene, involved in apoptosis (programmed cell
death), DNA repair, and cell cycle progression. We explore the
selective advantages and disadvantages of mutations in the p53 gene
on tumor cells, and the heterogeneity of tumor cell populations.
Based on an evolutionary computational approach, our model considers
changes in mutation rate caused by lack of DNA repair processes, and
the lack of apoptosis caused by mutations in p53. We find that the
degree of robustness of p53 to mutations has a significant effect on
the tumor heterogeneity and “fitness”, with clinical consequences
for people who inherit p53 mutations.
This paper explores fluctuations and noise in various facets of cancer development. The three areas of particular focus are the stochastic progression of cells to cancer, fluctuations of the tumor size during treatment, and noise in cancer cell signalling. We explore the stochastic dynamics of tumor growth and response to treatment using a Markov model, and fluctutions in tumor size in response to treatment using partial differential equations. We also explore noise within gene networks in cancer cells, and noise in inter-cell signalling.
Noise is present in the wide variety of signals obtained from sleep patients. This noise comes from a number of sources, from presence of extraneous signals to adjustments in signal amplification and shot noise in the circuits used for data collection. The noise needs to be removed in order to maximize the information gained about the patient using both manual and automatic analysis of the signals. Here we evaluate a number of new techniques for removal of that noise, and the associated problem of separating the original signal sources.
This paper explores the use of genetic algorithms for the design of networks, where the demands on the network fluctuate in time. For varying network constraints, we find the best network using the standard genetic algorithm operators such as inversion, mutation and crossover. We also examine how the choice of genetic algorithm operators affects the quality of the best network found. Such networks typically contain redundancy in servers, where several servers perform the same task and pleiotropy, where servers perform multiple tasks. We explore this trade-off between pleiotropy versus redundancy on the cost versus reliability as a measure of the quality of the network.
In this paper we present a 3D cellular automaton for exploring gene interactions in segmentation of Drosophila larvae. Beginning with the expression levels of maternally expressed genes such as bicoid, our simple model successfully produces the distinctive expression pattern of the even-skipped gene in the developing larvae. This work highlights how complex gene interactions in developing organism can nonetheless be accurately modeled using simple rules.
Evolutionary computation algorithms are increasingly being used to solve optimization problems as they have many advantages over traditional optimization algorithms. In this paper we use evolutionary computation to study the trade-off between pleiotropy and redundancy in a client-server based network. Pleiotropy is a term
used to describe components that perform multiple tasks, while redundancy refers to multiple components performing one same task. Pleiotropy reduces cost but lacks robustness, while redundancy increases network reliability but is more costly, as together, pleiotropy and redundancy build flexibility and robustness into
systems. Therefore it is desirable to have a network that contains a balance between pleiotropy and redundancy. We explore how factors such as link failure probability, repair rates, and the size of the network influence the design choices that we explore using genetic algorithms.
We introduce a model for simulating mutation of prokaryote DNA sequences. Using that model we can then evaluated traditional techniques like parsimony and maximum likelihood methods for computing phylogenetic relationships. We also use the model to mimic large scale genomic changes, and use this to evaluate multifractal and related information theory techniques which take into account these large changes in determining phylogenetic relationships.
A number of signal processing and statistical methods can be used in analyzing either pieces of text or DNA sequences. These techniques can be used in a number of ways, such as determining authorship of documents, finding genes in DNA, and determining phylogenetic and linguistic trees. Signal processing methods such as spectrograms provide useful new tools in the area of genomic information science. In particular, fractal analysis of DNA "signals" has provided a new way of classifying organisms.
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