Info-Metrics Institute College of Arts and Sciences, American University Fall 2016 Newsletter
Director’s Update
Contents Director’s Update............................1 Notes from the Advisory Board.....2 Thank you to Sponsors....................2 Associate Updates...........................3 Visiting Fellows...................................3 Research Updates.........................4-7 Prize Winners..................................8 Affiliate Profiles..........................9-10 Seminars...........................................9 New Research Associate...............10 Research Impact............................11 Aman Ullah Conference...............11 Grad Students ...............................12 Institute Events..............................12 Support the Institute.....................12
Info-Metrics Institute Department of Economics Kreeger Hall 4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW Washington, D.C. 20016-8029 info-metrics@american.edu www.american.edu/info-metrics
This is the Info-Metrics Institute’s seventh year. In our fifth year anniversary newsletter, I summarized our original vision, research agenda and some of the Institute’s achievements. I also mentioned that we must build on our momentum, keep pushing the research frontiers in info-metrics and enhance our role as a leading interdisciplinary institute. I proposed doing it via four inter-related avenues. I now report on our progress on these four avenues. First, we continued our efforts to engage with both young and established researchers from across the sciences, especially seeking to expand our representation from the natural, medical and engineering sciences. Through our regular process and our inaugural Info-Metrics Annual Prize we invited new affiliates and made sure that in each one of our events, there was special room for students and new researchers. In addition, we provided summer fellowships for graduate students who work under the supervision of one of the Institute’s affiliates. We Participants gather for a photo during the also organized a one-day workshop for these graduate student fellows, Philosophy of Information and Information jointly with their advisors and other affiliates, where each fellow disProcessing workshop at Pembroke College in cussed her/his research. We will continue all these activities. Oxford, UK in Spring 2015 Second, we wanted to expand our activities to locations outside the Washington DC area. We have done this successfully. So far we have had conferences and workshops in Riverside (California), Boulder (Colorado), Oxford (UK) and most recently one at Cambridge (UK). We plan to continue our cooperation with other institutes and universities across the globe. Third, we wanted to improve our tutorials and considered providing more tutorials, especially ‘hands-on’ tutorials, at different locations and in a more interdisciplinary way. We did so in 2015, but we are still searching for a better way of achieving this. As always, we are open for new ideas and suggestions. Fourth, we wanted to start thinking about a potential interdisciplinary graduate level program. Though I believe there is much demand for such a program, and the Institute can provide the expertise and leadership to achieve that, I also think that it demands more in the way of resources than we have right now. Remaining a small Institute has the benefit of enabling us to focus on research and the above activities while still working with the next generation of researchers, without the need to worry about large scale administrative headaches. As always, we thank the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for its generous and continued support. In addition, we thank our affiliate Aman Ullah for organizing and chairing our October 2014 conference at American University, “Recent innovations in info-metrics: an interdisciplinary perspective.” This conference marked our fifth year anniversary and gathered more than forty of our affiliates and many more additional participants. We also thank Min Chen and Luciano Floridi for co-chairing and organizing the workshop on the philosophy of information and information processing that took place in Oxford during spring, 2015. And we thank Alastair Hall and Richard Smith who co-chaired and organized our recent (spring, 2016) conference on information-theoretic methods of inference at CamUpcoming Institute Events bridge. Each one of these conferences touched on areas within info-metrics and brought Fall 2016 Workshop: researchers from different fields or sub-fields to discuss different ways of processing inInfo-Metrics State of Research: formation, learn from each other, and establish a common language. Lastly, we thank the Past Present and Future inaugural Prize committee, Mike Stutzer, (Chair), Ilya Nemenman and Teddy Seidenfeld, November 3, 2016 that invested much effort and time to identify the well-deserved three prize winners, who American University are featured in the Newsletter. I would also like to thank all of you for your support and interest in the InSpring 2017 Workshop: stitute. Our efforts to refine the common language of info-metrics that links disciInfo-Metrics and Causal Inference plines solving similar problems are showing good signs of success. As always, there Date TBD Spring 2017 is much more to do and this is good to know. American University Please check the Institute’s website frequently for information about our activities. Ideas for new initiatives are always welcome! For more information,
-Amos Golan, Director, Info-Metrics Institute
please visit our website.
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter
Notes from the Advisory Board
Robert Lerman, Chair
Intellectuals often generate new thoughts but few are capable and energetic enough to build a community to support and enrich the ideas. Even fewer can create and sustain an institutional home that fosters a community of scholars to expand the field and disseminate findings. From an idea to institution to a community takes painstaking work and a compelling paradigm that can attract and retain the interest of colleagues and
funders. Now in its seventh year and led by Professor Amos Golan, the Info-Metrics Institute has taken great strides in establishing and sustaining a community of scholars, in promoting in-depth exchanges, and in fostering of extraordinarily high level interactions. Because funding for the Institute has been modest, achieving these results has required not only special initiative by Professor Golan but a range of voluntary efforts by scholars and students. What is most striking is that the scores of scholars involved in the Institute have managed to sustain their enthusiasm for using the Info-Metrics Institute as a major vehicle for extending the frontiers of information science. Like small business, non-profit institutes often have a short life span. The Info-Metrics Institute’s continuing strength is a tribute to the founder, to staff, to the Info-Metrics affiliate scholars, and to the compelling concept of an institute devoted to multidisciplinary collaborations on information science. The vision of our sponsors, most importantly the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has played a vital role as well. In Fall 2015, the Institute celebrated its fifth year anniversary with a two-day conference attended by more than 100 participants, including over 40 Institute Affiliates. Indicative of Institute’s international reach and its collaboration with British scholars are the 2015 conference at Oxford University and 2016 conference at Cambridge University. The Oxford forum on the philosophy of information attracted top researchers in the field. The Cambridge conference dealt with the critical topic of “Information Theoretical Models of Inference.” It is noteworthy that one of the Info-Metrics Award winning papers was delivered at the Cambridge conference by an international scholar dealing with brain tumor cells. The Institute prize, recently established in honor of the brilliant econometrician and Institute board member Halbert White, was awarded to a political scientist (Jens Hainmueller at Stanford University), quantitative biologist (Justin Kinney at Cold Spring Harbor Institute) and Nataly KravchenkoBalasha (a medical researcher at Hebrew University). In addition to becoming an important center for scholars working on information science, the Institute is continuing to support the next generation of researchers with graduate fellowships for students from top universities and special tutorials. We see a great future. With the big data revolution opening new opportunities, the structured analytic work of the Info-Metrics Institute and its affiliates will be increasingly critical to using the vast stores of information to develop insights and findings that improve our understanding of the world.
Much of my recent work with graduate students at the New School for Social Research originates in the project of applying information theory concepts to economic data. Ellis Scharfenaker (an alum of Info-Metrics workshops) and Gregor Semieniuk carried out a path-breaking study of the tendency for profit rates to converge (a central insight of Adam Smith’s Duncan Foley, member Wealth of Nations) by applying maximum entropy methods to firm-level data on profit rates. I’ve lectured this last term on “Information and Behavior in Political Economy”, surveying a wide range of problems in classical political economy, Marxist economics, and the economics of Keynes where the incorporation of informational constraints into behavioral models has far-reaching theoretical and empirical ramifications. These lectures, through the support of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are available online at http://www. economicpolicyresearch.org/index.php/the-future-of-economics. Info-Metrics has made a major contribution to the work of my students and I hope Amos Golan and the other leaders of the Institute will pursue their fruitful enterprise.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is the primary sponsor of the Info-Metrics Institute. We wish to thank OCC for their continued generous support. We would like to thank Purdue University and the International Association for Applied Econometrics (IAAE) for their support toward the October 2014 conference, Recent Innovations in Info-Metrics. We would like to thank Oxford University for their help in supporting the Philosophy of Information and Information Processing conference in March 2015. We would also like to thank the University of Cambridge, Cambridge-INET and The Manchester School for their help in supporting the Information-Theoretic Methods of Inference Conference in April 2016.
www.american.edu/info-metrics
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Associate Updates: In Their Own Words
Min Chen
Ramo Gencay
The Info-Metrics Institute has provided me with a unique platform to discuss some fundamental questions about “information” with many esteemed and knowledgeable scholars from different disciplines. As a computer scientist specializing in data analysis and visualization, I have devoted most of my research effort to delivering techniques and systems for addressing the needs of different data-intensive applications, ranging from the sciences to humanities and from cybersecurity to sports. For me, the conferences organized by the Institute have been wonderful occasions, where I can sit back, learning and exploring the abstract world of theories and philosophies, all about aspects of “information”. For example, just before the Info-Metrics Fall Conference in 2014 in DC, Professor Amos Golan and I were working on an intriguing question about the resolution of time series: “When do we pause statistics and start visualization?” It was during that conference when we first came up with an initial abstract formulation of an informationtheoretic metric, possibly inspired by some talks unconsciously. Five months later, just after the Info-Metrics Spring Workshop in 2015 at Oxford, we finalized the metric, related it mathematically to Shannon’s grouping property, and evidenced its explanatory power using several case studies in the visualization literature. The work, which was accepted for publication at the end of 2015, enables comparison between machine-centric and human-centric processes in a data intelligence workflow.
I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to take what I learned from delivering practical solutions in various applications to the Info-Metrics Institute on one hand, and take what I learned from participating in theoretical discussions in the Institute back to practice on the other hand. My research has benefitted from the activities of the Institute enormously. Whilst there is abundant energy and effort around the world for handling large volumes of data, the Info-Metrics Institute is playing a unique role in advancing the core of data science by bringing diverse disciplinary knowledge together.
Seventeen years ago, I coauthored two books, one of which is “Introduction to High Frequency Finance”, where in those days data for every five minutes was a rather novel way of analyzing financial activity. At the same time, there were heated discussions as to why one would need data at such frequencies; the objection was that sampling more frequently may not bring additional degrees of freedom, so why do it? The literature has come a long way since that time. Now, high-frequency data analysis is a standard toolset for market microstructure analysis of financial markets as we go toward wider availability of nanosecond data frequency. Similarly, methods for analyzing data both in frequency and time resolutions were not widely available in economics and finance in the late 90’s. The usage of short, medium or longterm dynamics was rather informal. When the data contained all components of short, medium and long term dynamics at a given point in time, methods to identify these components were not in the common toolset. My second book, “An introduction to Wavelets and Other Filtering Methods in Finance and Economics” is an approach for multiple time frequency time analysis, testing and modelling in economics and finance. Since then, the area of research in wavelets is accelerating and has demonstrated itself as a useful toolset in econometrics. Info-Metrics is such a frontier Institute, full of innovative perspectives where methods of analysis merge into useful tools for policy, regulation and forecasting. I hope energetic talent will push these angles, further contributing to the Institute’s mission.
Institute Visiting Fellows (between Fall 2014 and Spring 2016)
Min Chen (University of Oxford) Raphael D. Levine (Hebrew University and UCLA) Aman Ullah (University of California Riverside)
Audience prepares for a presentation at the Recent Innovations in Info-Metrics conference in October 2014 at American University in Washington, DC
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter
Our Work: Leading Interdisciplinary Info-Metrics Research Following is a list of representative research and recent publications by some of the Institute’s affiliates. More detailed information can be found in the 2016 Info-Metrics Annual Report, which will be available on our website on December 2016. Radu Balan (University of Maryland) Forthcoming/Recent Publications • “Excursions in Harmonic Analysis”, vol. 3 and 4, 2015 • “Excursions in Harmonic Analysis”, vol. 5 – to appear 2017 • R. Balan, “Frames and Phaseless Reconstruction”, to appear in Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, AMS 2016 • R. Balan, “Reconstruction of Signals from Magnitudes of Redundant Representations: The Complex Case”, Found.of Comput.Math., vol. 16, no.3, (2016) 677-721 • R. Balan, D. Zou, “Lipschitz Analysis and Lipschitz Synthesis for the Phase Retrieval Problem”, to appear in Linear Algebra and Applications (2016) Other Updates • Has organized the Summer Graduate School on Modern Harmonic Analysis and Applications at University of Maryland, July 20-August 8, 2015 • “On the Intrinsic Value of Information”, joint work in progress with Amos Golan Marine Carrasco (University of Montreal) Current Research • Primary work in the areas of estimation and inference in Econometrics. • Applies regularization techniques from the inverse problems literature to information-based estimation methods. Forthcoming/Recent Publications • “Regularized LIML for many instruments”, Journal of Econometrics, 2015, 186, 427-442 (with Guy Tchuente) • “Efficient estimation with many weak instruments using regularization techniques”, forthcoming in Econometric Reviews (with Guy Tchuente) • “Efficient Estimation Using the Characteristic Function”, forthcoming in Econometric Theory (with Rachidi Kotchoni) • “In-sample Inference and Forecasting in Misspecified Factor Models”, forthcoming in Journal of Business & Economic Statistics (with Barbara Rossi) Bowen Garrett (Urban Institute, Health Policy Center) Current Research • Effects of the Affordable Care Act on labor market outcomes. • Payment methods for health care services under Medicare and Medicaid. • Policy and program evaluation. Recent Publications • Estimating the Counterfactual: How Many Uninsured Adults Would There Be Today Without the ACA (with Linda J. Blumberg and John Holahan) • Recent Evidence on the ACA and Employment: Has the ACA been a Job Killer? (with Robert Kaestner) • Health Insurer Responses to Medical Loss Ratio Regulation Increased Efficiency and Value to Consumers (with Lisa Clemans-Cope and Douglas A. Wissoker)
George Judge (University of California Berkeley) Current Research • Stochastic Dynamic Systems. • Non-linear -ordinal economic time series. • Information Recovery in Behavioral Networks. • Causal path entropy. Forthcoming/Recent Publications • Martin, M.,A. Plastino,V. Vampo and G. Judge, 2014, A parametric Information Theory Model for Predictions in Time Series, Physica, A,405:63-69 • Cho, W. and G. Judge, 2014, An Information Theoretic Approach to Network Tomography, Applied Econometric Letters, DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2013.86619 • Judge, G., 2015, Entropy Maximization as a Basis for Information recovery in Dynamic Economic Behavioral Systems, Econometrics, 3:91-100 • Lee, J., W. Cho and G. Judge, 2015, Generalizing Benfords Law: A Re-examination of Falsified Clinical Data, S. Fisher, Editor, Princeton University Press, 313-331 • Miller, D. and G. Judge, 2015, Information Recovery in a Dynamic Statistical Markov Model, Econometrics, 3:187-198 • Squartini, T., S.E. Seri-Giacomi, D. Garlaschelli, and G. Judge, 2015, Information Recovery In Behavioral Networks. PLOS 10(5), e01277 • Villa-Boas, S., Q. Fu and G. Judge, 2015, Is Benford’s Law a Universal Behavioral Law, Econometrics, 3, 698-708 • Judge, G., 2016, Entropy Based Inference For Behavioral Networks, Econometrics, In Press • Baviviera, A., A. Plastina and G. Judge, 2016, Spurious Seasonality Detection: A Nonparametric Test, Journal of Financial Econometrics, Under Review Amos Golan (American University) Current Research • Foundations of info-metrics. • Value of information. • Info-metrics modeling and inference. • Causality and info-metrics. • Information-Theoretic inference of interval data. Recent Publications • Interval estimation: An Information Theoretic Approach (with A. Ullah), Econometric Reviews (Forthcoming) • What May Visualization Processes Optimize? (with M. Chen), IEEE, TVCG (Forthcoming; Preprint online: https://www. computer.org/csdl/trans/tg/preprint/07368928.pdf); • On the Construction of Prior Information – An Info-Metrics Approach (with R. Lumsdaine) Advances in Econometrics 36 (Forthcoming) • Incorporating Prior Information When True Priors are Unknown: An Information-Theoretic Approach for Increasing Efficiency in Estimation (with H. Henderson and S. Seabold), Economics Letters 127 (2015) 1–5 continues on page 5
www.american.edu/info-metrics Other Updates • External Professor (Appointment) - Santa Fe Institute • Visiting Professor: Hebrew University • Six Day Advanced Info-Metrics Tutorial – Chiang Mai University, Thailand (2016) • Visiting Fellowship Appointment, Oxford • Co-Editor (with M. Chen, M, M., Dunn, A. Golan and A. Ullah, “Innovations in Info-Metrics: Information and Information Processing in Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (Oxford U Press – Expected, 2017) John Harte (University of California, Berkeley) Current Research • The Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE)has been extended from species level to broader taxonomic categories, paving the way to a theory of phylogenetic trees. • METE has been applied successfully to help understand diversity patterns observed in the human gut microbiome. • Considerable progress has been made extending METE from a static theory to one that can predict macroecological patterns in ecosystems that are changing in time, either because they are responding to disturbance or naturally varying over evolutionary or successional time. Recent Publications • “Maximum entropy as a framework for ecological theory”. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 29(7), 384-389. Harte, J., Newman, E. (2014) • “Inferring Regional-Scale Species Diversity from Small-Plot Censuses” Harte, J., Kitzes. J. (2015) • “Extending the maximum entropy theory of ecology to higher taxonomic levels”. Ecology Letters 18:1068-1077. Harte, J., Rominger, and A., Y. Zhang (2015) • “Predicting extinction debt from community patterns”, Ecology 96(8), 2127-2136. Kitzes, J., Harte, J. (2015) • “Empirical tests of within- and across-species energetics in a diverse plant community”. Ecology 95(10), 2815-2825. Newman, E., Harte, M., Lowell, N., Wilber, M. and Harte, J. (2014) • “Community assembly on isolated islands: macroecology meets evolution”, Global Ecology and Biogeography, DOI: 10.1111/ geb.12341. Rominger, A. J. + 19 authors including J. Harte (2015) • “Scale collapse and the emergence of the power law species– area relationship”, Global Ecology and Biogeography DOI: 10.1111/geb.12309. Wilber, M., Kitzes, J. Harte. J. (2015) Nathan Harshman (American University) Forthcoming/Recent Publications • N.L. Harshman, “Physics of Information,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information, ed. Luciano Floridi, (Oxford, in press) • N.L. Harshman, “Symmetry and Natural Quantum Structures for Three-Particles in One-Dimension,” in Quantum Structural Studies, eds. Ruth Kastner, Jasmina Jeknić-Dugić, and George Jaroszkiewicz, (World Scientific, in press) • N.L. Harshman, “One-Dimensional Trap, Two-Body Interactions, Few-Body Symmetries I.: One, Two, and Three Particles” Few-Body Systems, 75, 11-43 (2016) • N.L. Harshman, “One-Dimensional Trap, Two-Body Interactions, Few-Body Symmetries II.: N Particles” Few-Body Systems, 75, 45-69 (2016)
5 Other Updates • Visiting Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark for AY1617 doing research in few-body physics and quantum information • Gave short course on quantum information at Grinnell College, Iowa in March 2015 Heath Henderson (Inter-American Development Bank) Current Research • The structure of risk-sharing networks in developing countries. • The development impact of inter-governmental fiscal transfers. • Modern agricultural value chains and the organization of agrarian production. Recent Publications • Land accumulation dynamics in developing country agriculture, Journal of Development Studies, Volume 51, pp. 743-761, 2015 (with L. Corral, E. Simning, and P. Winters) • Considering technical and allocative efficiency in the inverse farm size-productivity relationship, Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 66, pp. 442-469, 2015 • Incorporating prior information when true priors are unknown: An information-theoretic approach for increasing efficiency in estimation, Economics Letters, Volume 127, pp. 1-5, 2015 (with A. Golan and S. Seabold) Other Updates • Accepted Assistant Professor of Economics position at Drake University • Visiting Assistant Professor at Makerere University Business School in Kampala, Uganda (summer 2016) Justin B. Kinney (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY) Current Research • Development of massively parallel assays for measuring quantitative sequence-function relationships in molecular biology. • Development of inference methods, particularly methods based on mutual information maximization, for learning quantitative models of sequence-function relationships from massively parallel assays. • Development of field-theoretic methods for statistical data analysis. Recent Publications • Ireland WT, Kinney JB. MPAthic: modeling quantitative sequence-function relationships for massively parallel assays. bioRxiv doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/054676 (2016) • Morrison MJ, Kinney JB. Modeling multi-particle complexes in stochastic chemical systems. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/045435 (2016) • Adams RM, Kinney JB, Mora T, Walczak AM. Measuring the sequence-affinity landscape of antibodies with massively parallel titration curves. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/036335 (2016) • Sheu Y-J, Kinney JB, Stillman B. Concerted activities of Mcm4, Sld3 and Dbf4 in control of origin activation and DNA replication fork progression. Genome Res 26:315-330 (2016)
We welcome Justin B. Kinney from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY) as a new Research Associate. continues on page 6
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter Atwal G, Kinney JB. Learning quantitative sequence-function relationships from massively parallel experiments. J Stat Phys 162(5):1203-1243 (2016). Open Access Kinney JB. Unification of field theory and maximum entropy methods for learning probability densities. Phys Rev E 92:032107 (2015) Shi J, Wang E, Milazzo JP, Wang A, Kinney JB, Vakoc CR. Discovery of cancer drug targets by CRISPR-Cas9 screening of protein domains. Nat Biotechnol 33(6):661-667 (2015) Wang E, Kawaoka S, Roe J-S, Shi J, Hohmann AF, Xu Y, Bhagwat AS, Suzuki Y, Kinney JB, Vakoc CR. The transcriptional cofactor TRIM33 prevents apoptosis in B lymphoblastic leukemia by deactivating a single enhancer. eLife 4:e06377 (2015)
Other Updates • Affiliate member of the bioRxiv (2013 - present) • Affiliate member of the Info-Metrics Institute at American University (2015 - present) • Invited member of the “Scialog: Molecules Come to Life II” workshop (March 2016) • Member of the “Machine Learning, Inference, and Statistical Physics” working group at the Aspen Center for Physics (July 2015) • Invited member of the “Gene Regulation by the Numbers” workshop at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (June 2015) • Invited member of the “Scialog: Molecules Come to Life” workshop (March 2015)
We welcome Nataly Kravchenko-Balasha from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a new Research Associate. Nataly Kravchenko-Balasha (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Current Research • Developing and implementing experimental and Information theoretical approaches to: (1) identify patient-specific processes involved in cancer development, (2) rationally design personalized combination therapy for every patient, and (3) study the influence of the cell-cell and cell-environment interactions on directed cellcell migration, cellular signaling and cancer tissue architectures. Robin Lumsdaine (American University) Current Research • Exploring the relationship between financial market perceptions and reality, and the role of news and information in shaping those perceptions. • How survey design affects participant responses and subsequent inference. • The impact of the changing demographic landscape on the global financial markets. Recent Publications • “Market Set-Up in Advance of Federal Reserve Policy Decisions,”, Economic Journal 126, 618-653, 2016 [with Dick van Dijk and Michel van der Wel] • “Retirement Timing of Women and the Role of Caring Responsibilities for Grandchildren,” Demography 52(2), 433454, 2015 [with Stephanie J.C. Vermeer] • “On the Construction of Prior Information – An Info-Metrics Approach,” in G. Gonzalez-Rivera, R.C. Hill, and T-H Lee (eds.), Advances in Econometrics, Volume 36: Essays in Honor of Aman Ullah. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Group, 277-314, 2016 [with Amos Golan]
Other Updates • Awarded Fellowship from National Bank of Poland to visit and conduct research • Awarded Fellowship from Office of Financial Research, US Department of the Treasury • Elected Fellow, Society for Financial Econometrics Ilya Nemenman (Emory University) Current Research • Using modern machine learning methods for automatically discovery of phenomenological laws underlying biological systems dynamics. • Network information processing in brains, cell collectives, and populations. • Encoding and decoding of temporal information in motor neurons. Recent Publications • T Smith, S Fancher, A Levchenko, I Nemenman and A Mugler. Role of spatial averaging in multicellular gradient sensing. Physical Biology 13(3), 035004, 2016 • L Merchan, I Nemenman. On the Sufficiency of Pairwise Interactions in Maximum Entropy Models of Networks. Journal of Statistical Physics 162 (5), 1294-1308, 2016 • D Ellison, A Mugler, MD Brennan, et al. Cell–cell communication enhances the capacity of cell ensembles to sense shallow gradients during morphogenesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (6), E679-E688, 2016 • A Mugler, A Levchenko, I Nemenman. Limits to the precision of gradient sensing with spatial communication and temporal integration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (6), E689-E695, 2016 • BC Daniels, I Nemenman Automated adaptive inference of phenomenological dynamical models, Nature communications 6, 2015 • I Nemenman, A mathematical framework for falsifiability. Physics Today 68 (10), 11, 2015 • Millisecond-scale motor encoding in a cortical vocal area. C Tang, D Chehayeb, K Srivastava, I Nemenman, SJ Sober. PLoS Biology 12 (12), e1002018 Other Updates • Chair, Division of Biological Physics, American Physical Society • Editorial Board, Physical Biology Rossella Bernardini Papalia (University of Bologna) Current Research • Entropy-based methods in ecological inference with spatial dependence. • Small area estimation problems. • Spatial econometric models for panel data. Forthcoming/Recent Publications • Information Theoretic competitiveness composite indicator at micro level, in Social Indicators Research, 2014, (with P. Calia and C. Filippucci) • Developing a composite index by using spatial latent modeling based on IT estimation, revised and resubmitted for publication in Quality and Quantity 49(3), 2015 (with E. Ciavolino) • Trade costs in bilateral trade flows: Heterogeneity and zeroes in structural gravity models, revised and resubmitted for publication, The World Economy, Vol. 38, Issue 11, pp. 17441762, 2015 (with S. Bertarelli) continues on page 7
www.american.edu/info-metrics •
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Information Theoretic Methods in Small Domain Estimation, in Econometric Reviews, 2015 (with E. Fernandez-Vazquez) A cure for misspecification of Spatial Weights Matrix: the Data Weighted Prior estimator, 2016 (with E. Fernandez-Vazquez) Spatial dependence in a structural gravity model with heterogeneous firms, 2016 (with S. Bertarelli)
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Jeffrey Racine (McMaster University) Recent Publications • Beheshti, N., J.S. Racine and E.S. Soofi (2016), “Information Measures of Kernel Estimation” • Koch, S. and J.S. Racine (forthcoming), “Health Care Facility Choice and User Fee Abolition: Regression Discontinuity in a Multinomial Choice Setting,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A • Kiefer, N.M. and J.S. Racine (forthcoming), “The Smooth Colonel and the Reverend Find Common Ground,” Econometric Reviews • Racine, J.S. (forthcoming), “Local Polynomial Derivative Estimation: Analytic or Taylor?” Advances in Econometrics, Volume 36 • Maasoumi, E. and J.S. Racine (2016), “A Solution to Aggregation and an Application to Multidimensional ‘Well-Being’ Frontiers,” Journal of Econometrics, Volume 191, pages 374–383 • Chakrabarty, M., A. Majumder and J.S. Racine (2015), “Household Preference Distribution and Welfare Implication: An Application of Multivariate Distributional Statistics,” Journal of Applied Statistics, Volume 42, Issue 12, pages 2754–2768 • Ma, S. and J.S. Racine and L. Yang (2015), “Spline Regression in the Presence of Categorical Predictors,” Journal of Applied Econometrics, Volume 30, 705–717 • Hall, P. and J.S. Racine (2015), “Infinite Order Cross-Validated Local Polynomial Regression,” Journal of Econometrics, Volume 185, 510–525 • Racine, J.S. (2015), “Mixed Data Kernel Copulas,” Empirical Economics, Volume 48, 37–59 • Gao, Q. and L. Liu and J.S. Racine (2015), “A Partially Linear Kernel Estimator for Categorical Data,” Econometric Reviews, Volume 34 (6-10), 958–977
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Michael Stutzer (University of Colorado Boulder) Forthcoming Publications • “Honest Hypothesis Testing: A Parable,” Advances in Financial Education Other Updates • Entropy in Financial Contagion Research (Working Paper, presented at conferences and seminars) • Entropic Diagnostics for Asset Pricing SDFs: A Critique (Working Paper, presented at conferences and seminars)
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Analyses of how much a player in a game would pay to change a parameter of the game. Nonequilibrium statistical physics extensions and corrections to earlier work in the Thermodynamics of Computation. Bayes-optimal lookahead optimization. Post-processing Monte Carlo samples using cross-validation to increase accuracy of associated expectation values. Embedding game theory in continuous time Markov Chains. Reduced order modeling.
Recent Publications • Reducing the error of Monte Carlo Algorithms by Learning Control Variates (with BD Tracey) • Correction: Wolpert, DH The Free Energy Requirements of Biological Organisms; Implications for Evolution. Entropy 18 (6), 219 • A likelihood ratio anomaly detector for identifying withinperimeter computer network attacks (with J Grana J Neil, D Xie, T Bhattacharya, R Bent). Journal of Network and Computer Applications 66, 166-179, 2016 • The free energy requirements of biological organisms; implications for evolution. Entropy 18 (4), 138 • Optimal lost-link policies for unmanned aircraft (Y Kim, MJ Kochenderfer, J Grana, J Bono) • Minimal work required for arbitrary computation. 2015 • The Gaping Holes in Social Science. Review of Behavioral Economics 2 (1-2), 203-210 • Population-Area Relationship in Medieval European Cities (with R Cesaretti, J Lobo, LMA Bettencourt, S Ortman, M Smith). Santa Fe Institute Working Papers, 15-10-036 • Can Small Crowds Be Wise? Moderate-Sized Groups Can Outperform Large Groups and Individuals Under Some Task Conditions (with M Galesic, D Barkoczi, K Katsikopoulos, P Perrone, N Ay, B Straatman). Santa Fe Institute • Decision Making: Uncertainty, Imperfection, Deliberation and Scalability. Springer • Game Mining: How to Make Money from those about to Play a Game (with JW Bono) • Entangled Political Economy, 179-211 • Optimal high-level descriptions of dynamical systems (with JA Grochow, E Libby, S DeDeo) • A framework for optimal high-level descriptions in science and engineering—preliminary report (with JA Grochow, E Libby, S DeDeo)
David Wolpert (Santa Fe Institute) Current Research •
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Models of optimal social organizations and their dynamics based on viewing an organization as a communication network optimized for the limited capacities of its constituent members. Analyses of the differential value to the players in a game of changing parameters specifying that game.
Roundtable (L-R: Nick Kiefer, Rossella Bernardini Papalia, Constantino Tsallis, Michael Dunn, Min Chen, Richard Smith and Robin Lumsdaine) at the Recent Innovations in Info-Metrics conference in October 2014 at American University in Washington, DC
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter
Info-Metrics Prize Winners The Info-Metrics Institute research prize was established in memory of Professor Halbert L. White, Jr., one of the Institute's founding members, who passed away on March 31, 2012. The prizes reward outstanding academic research. The prizes are intended for early career scholars across all disciplines who earned their doctorate degree within the decade prior to the nomination deadline, who creatively used info-metrics methods in their respective disciplines, with the potential for significant impact in those disciplines. The winner(s) received a certificate, monetary award and an invitation to become an Institute Research Associate, with the benefits that being an Associate provides. Prize winners are recognized at regular meetings (either conferences or workshops) held by the Institute. We include here a summary of each winner’s research, recognized at the recent conference in Cambridge. Nataly K. Balasha Nataly Kravchenko-Balasha completed her PhD in 2010 in experimental biochemistry at the Hebrew University under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Levitzki. Following graduation, Professor Balasha was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew university in the theoretical chemistry group of Prof. Raphael D. Levine. In July 2015 she completed her postdoctoral research at Caltech in the biophysical chemistry group of Prof. James R Heath and started a new job as an assistant professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her broad research interests are to develop thermodynamic-based information-theoretic approaches for system-level analysis and for understanding of complex human diseases, such as cancer. Her goal is to apply concepts from physical science to gain quantitative and predictive understanding of changes in protein/transcriptional/ metabolic regulatory networks that drive the emergent characteristics of diseased tissues. During her post-doctoral training she established a quantitative approach that determines the stability of a phosphoprotein signaling network in two Glioblastoma (GBM, brain tumor) interacting cells and demonstrated how that stability dictates the cell-cell distance distribution in a bulk culture. Recently she found that the free energy gradient of GBM cell-cell signaling directs cell-cell motion through exchanged proteins. Also she has used thermodynamic based approaches to identify tumor specific unbalanced processes and their differential influence across the various tumors. Those processes may provide insights for identifying-patient oriented combination therapies. Her grand vision is to develop a compact way to describe and to predict cellular processes that are often viewed as ‘complex’ biological phenomena through experimental-theoretical approaches based on physico-chemical laws.
Jens Hainmueller Jens Hainmueller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Immigration and Integration Policy Lab and a Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Europe Center. His research interests include statistical methods, immigration, political economy, and political behavior. He has published over 30 articles, many of them in leading journals in political science, economics, and statistics, such as the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Review of Economics and Statistics, Political Analysis Management Science, and International Organization. He has also published three open source software packages and his research has received awards from the American Political Science Association, the Society of Political Methodology, and the Midwest Political Science Association. Professor Hainmueller received his PhD from Harvard University and also studied at the London School of Economics, Brown University, and the University of Tübingen. Before joining Stanford, he served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Justin B. Kinney Justin B. Kinney is an Assistant Professor in the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Professor Kinney completed his BA in Physics and Math from Cornell University in 2002. In 2008 he received his PhD in Physics from Princeton University for work performed under the supervision of Curtis Callan and Edward Cox. From 2010 to 2014 he was a Quantitative Biology Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Professor Kinney’s research uses an integrative combination of theory, computation, and experiment to advance the understanding of quantitative sequence-function relationships in molecular biology. Of particular interest is how the programs that govern when and where cells express different genes are encoded within genomic DNA. One arm of Professor Kinney’s research program focuses on developing and applying new experimental methods that use ultra-high-throughput DNA sequencing to dissect the biophysical basis of these regulatory programs. The other arm of his research effort centers on developing new mathematical and computational methods for addressing the statistical learning problems that are highlighted by this experimental work.
www.american.edu/info-metrics
Alastair Hall
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Affiliate Profiles
Alastair R. Hall (Professor of Econometrics at the University of Manchester, UK) works on the development and evaluation of methods for inference in econometric models, with a particular focus being on models estimated via Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). His previous work on GMM has explored issues such as: the interpretation and behavior of the estimator in misspecified models; testing for neglected structural stability; and methods for moment selection. More recently, his work focuses on the comparison of GMM to information-theoretic methods, both in terms of their theoretical properties and also in the context of empirical applications. With colleagues at Manchester, he is currently working on the application of information-theoretic methods to study the impact of host-country language fluency on the economic outcomes for immigrants. He is the author of both Generalized Method of Moments published by Oxford University press in their series of Advanced Texts in Econometrics, and also a number of handbook chapters on GMM. He has also given a number of invited lecture courses on moment-based estimation at institutions in Europe and the US. Professor Hall is a member of the Advisory Board for the Infometrics Institute, and was co-organizer with Richard Smith of the Institute’s Spring 2016 Conference on Information-theoretic Methods of Inference held at Clare College, Cambridge, UK. For more information about his research and teaching activities please visit his web page (http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/ alastair.hall/personaldetails).
Ilya Nemenman
Ilya Nemenman (Associate Professor of Physics and Biology, Emory University) works on understanding biological information processing — how biological systems, such as cells, organisms, and populations, learn from their surrounding environment and respond to
it. He addresses questions like “What are the computational primitives employed by living organisms to extract useful bits of data from their surroundings?” and “Are there phenomenological, coarse-grained, and yet functionally accurate representations of biological information-processing phenomena?” The dream is that, by stripping unnecessary details, we will eventually understand the basics of how living systems can function reliably in an ever changing world. He has co-developed popular algorithms for estimation of information-theoretic quantities and for reverse-engineering of biological signal transduction networks from empirical data, and then applied these tools to study systems as diverse as transcriptional control and protein signaling in cancer cells, sensorimotor learning and motor control in songbirds, and pain transduction in a roundworm. Some of the most recent work in his lab includes discovery and quantification of multicellular information relays in development of mammary tissue, and development of algorithms for automated inference of underlying phenomenological dynamics from time series data. Professor Nemenman is the Chair of the division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society and the Chair of The q-bio (quantitative biology) Board.
Institute Seminars
(between Fall 2014 and Spring 2016)
“On the Intrinsic Value of Information or Is There An Absolute Value of Information” October 1, 2014 Amos Golan (American University) “Myths and Promises of Data Intelligence” October 22, 2014 Min Chen (University of Oxford) “The Intrafirm Complexity of Systemically Important Financial Institutions” September 9, 2015 Robin L. Lumsdaine (American University)
Participants having dinner during the Philosophy of Information and Information Processing Workshop at Pembroke College in Oxford, UK in Spring 2015
“Cost-Benefit Analysis of Data Intelligence Processes” November 4, 2015 Min Chen (University of Oxford)
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter
Affiliate Profiles (continued from page 9)
Robin Lumsdaine Robin L. Lumsdaine (Crown Prince of Bahrain Professor of International Finance, Kogod School of Business, American University) has broad research interests, a result of having discovered as an undergraduate that econometrics enabled her to use mathematics and statistics to study a wide variety of real-world questions. As a graduate student, her research interests focused on two quite disparate areas of literature, time series econometrics and the economics of aging, but in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, these areas have become unexpectedly linked as countries seek to address the economic challenges created by the changing demographic landscape. Following stints in both the private sector and government, her research interests now center on how perceptions (e.g., as reported in surveys) relate to and shape reality (e.g., as defined by objective data and measurement) and how such perceptions can affect economic decisions. For example, the perception of a troubled bank may lead to a bank run despite balance sheet information that suggests the bank is well-capitalized. Or an individual’s perception of being healthy may result in fewer visits to the doctor, leading to a delayed diagnosis and poorer health outcomes. Recent papers with a variety of coauthors have considered how care responsibilities for grandchildren affect retirement decisions, how fed funds futures markets set-up in advance of Federal Reserve communications, the role of question order and framing in survey responses, and ways to measure systemic risk in firms with complex organizational structures. In addition to being on the Advisory Board of the Info-Metrics Institute, Professor Lumsdaine is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Senior Fellow of the Center for Financial Stability (CFS), a Fellow of the Society for Financial Econometrics (SoFiE), and a Fellow of the Network for Studies of Pension, Aging, and Retirement (Netspar). In Fall 2016 she will be on partial secondment to the Office of Financial Research, United States Treasury, through an Intergovernmental Personnel Arrangement with American University to further develop metrics for assessing the complexity of systemically important financial institutions.
Welcome New Research Associate Sabina Leonelli! Professor Sabina Leonelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter (UK). She serves as the Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, where she leads the Data Studies research strand (www.datastudies.eu). She is also the Open Science lead for the Global Young Academy and a member of the Open Science Policy Platform of the European Commission. Her research focuses on the philosophy, history and sociology of data-intensive science, especially the research processes, scientific outputs and social embedding of Open Science, Open Data and Big Data. She holds an ERC Starting Grant to investigate and compare existing strategies for dissemination and re-use of data across several fields, with emphasis on the biological and biomedical domains. Her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study is appearing later this year with Chicago University Press.
The Institute organized their first annual meeting of the Info-Metrics Institute Graduate Students Fellows and Advisors. The Workshop took place on December 19, 2014 at American University in Washington, DC. Here, the audience prepares for a presentation made by a Fellow.
info-metrics [in-fo-MET-riks] noun: the science and practice of inference and quantitative information processing.
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter
Info-Metrics Research Impact: Ehsan Soofi Professor Ehsan Soofi’s research interests are in information-theoretic approaches for probability modeling and Bayesian statistics, and their applications in decision problems. He develops probability models based on incomplete information and measures for quantifying intangible concepts such as uncertainty, information, disagreement, and importance of predictors and attributes. His research provides insights about information concepts and measures, and shows their usefulness in statistics, econometrics, and reliability analysis. The impact of Professor Soofi’s research is best summarized by late Arnold Zellner for a Lubar School of Business newsletter as follows: “His articles have appeared in leading publications and have had an enlightening impact on many in academia, industry and government. His synthesis of information theory and statistical theory has been very productive in terms of broadening statistics, integrating information and statistical theory and providing better solutions to many problems.” Because of the interdisciplinary nature, Professor Soofi’s research has been published in the leading journals of seven academic disciplines: statistics, econometrics, operations research and applied probability, engineering, management, and information systems. His research has been cited by academics across many disciplines such as statistics, economics, physics, law, and various fields of business, engineering, natural, and biomedical sciences. His research also has been useful for practitioners. Joseph Retzer, a former Director of Marketing Science Research at Maritz, described for a Lubar School of Business Newsletter as follows: “Publications co-authored with Professor Soofi have formed the basis for an important and unique approach to modeling driver analysis in areas such as customer satisfaction and choice modeling, both of which are common in the industry.”
March 2015 Conference In Honor of Aman Ullah In honor of Institute Advisory Board member Aman Ullah (University of California Riverside), the Institute co-sponsored the Conference in Honor of Aman Ullah at Riverside Mission Inn in Riverside, CA from March 13-15, 2015. Distinguished econometricians, who are Aman’s friends, coauthors, and students, were been invited to the conference. The senior co-editors of Advances in Econometrics (AIE) agreed to publish a festschrift volume in honor of Aman Ullah. More details can be found on the conference details page here:
http://economics.ucr.edu/conferences/ullah/
Several participants of the March 2015 Conference in Honor of Aman Ullah were Institute affiliates. They gather here for a photo at Mission Inn Riverside in Riverside, CA
Check out our website for updates on the Institute’s work and upcoming events. Bookmark our site and visit often! www.american.edu/info-metrics
Roundtable I (L-R: Jan van Leeuwen, Luciano Floridi, Ramo Gencay and Min Chen) at the Philosophy of Information and Information Processing workshop in Spring 2015 at Pembroke College in Oxford, UK
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Info-Metrics Institute Fall 2016 Newsletter
Graduate Students in Their Own Words Huancheng Du (American University) Adviser: Amos Golan Network analysis (graph theory) has recently become a popular area of research in the social sciences and economics. A particular type of graph is useful in characterizing hierarchical relationships. However, as trees become large (i.e. the number of nodes increase), it becomes difficult to identify the relative importance of the many branches. For example, consider a tree representing the hierarchy of a firm, where each node is weighted by its budget or spending. As the number of subdivisions in the firm grows, it becomes difficult to identify which divisions are important in budgetary terms. One solution is to reduce and aggregate nodes (i.e. by adding or averaging the budgets of subdivisions). However, many possible aggregations are possible. I am working on a project that identifies the best possible reduction of a tree (from say M nodes to N nodes), where I define the best reduction as the N node tree that preserves the most information from the original M node tree. Jinji Hao (Washington University St. Louis) Adviser: Werner Ploberger European options are the right to buy or sell a security for a fixed price at a fixed future date. One can use cross sections of its option prices (Breeden and Litzenberger, 1978) for inference on the beliefs of the market. My research focuses on making inference from the way the market updates its beliefs reflected in the time series of risk-neutral densities implied by option price panels. By appealing to the high frequency option data and exploiting an approximated factor structure in the changes of log-densities, we are able to test for the number of fundamental innovations in the option market and recover the scores of density and the innovations, up to a linear transformation.
Recent Institute Events Workshops and Conferences Recent Innovations in Info-Metrics October 31 - November 1, 2014 American University The First Annual Meeting of the InfoMetrics Institute Graduate Student Fellows and Advisors December 19, 2014 American University Philosophy of Information and Information Processing March 27, 2015 Pembroke College, Oxford, UK Information-Theoretic Methods of Inference April 1-2, 2016 Clare College, Cambridge, UK Summer Tutorials “Nonparametric Kernel Methods for Practitioners Across the Sciences” May 18-22, 2015 Jeffrey S. Racine (McMaster University) “Interdisciplinary Applications of Microeconometrics” May 26-30, 2015 William H. Greene (New York University)
Support the Institute! The Info-Metrics Institute is happy to receive donations toward its different activities. Contributions to the Institute are tax deductible, subject to federal and state guidelines. With these resources, we hope to establish more long-term fellowships for students and junior and senior researchers. We also hope to be able to expand our classes and knowledge dissemination activities. For more information on how to donate, please contact the Institute at info-metrics@american.edu or 202-885-3770. Editors: Aisha Khan and Arnob Alam.