#stochastic process

[wikilalia]

Stochastic Process

[opens-up-4-nobody]

For eggtober :-P

[taohun]

she's so me

[raffaellopalandri]

Advanced Methodologies for Algorithmic Bias Detection and Correction

I continue today the description of Algorithmic Bias detection. Photo by Google DeepMind on Pexels.com The pursuit of fairness in algorithmic systems necessitates a deep dive into the mathematical and statistical intricacies of bias. This post will provide just a small glimpse of some of the techniques everyone can use, drawing on concepts from statistical inference, optimization theory, and…

[dancingplague]

This book consistently acts as though measure theory is the scariest thing in the world which is tbh kind of rich for a book called "arbitrage theory in continuous time"

[cybereliasacademy]

Rollout Heuristics for Online Stochastic Contingent Planning: Introduction

Subscribe .taa0be8e4-8cc2-4c7d-82db-5f8a4da8d8ce { color: #fff; background: #222; border: 1px solid transparent; border-radius: undefinedpx; padding: 8px 21px; } .taa0be8e4-8cc2-4c7d-82db-5f8a4da8d8ce.place-top { margin-top: -10px; } .taa0be8e4-8cc2-4c7d-82db-5f8a4da8d8ce.place-top::before { content: “”; background-color: inherit; position: absolute; z-index: 2; width: 20px; height: 12px; }…

[lejournaldupeintre]

Mathematician who tamed randomness wins Abel Prize

Michel Talagrand laid mathematical groundwork that has allowed others to tackle problems involving random processes. A mathematician who developed formulas to make random processes more predictable and helped to solve an iconic model of complex phenomena has won the 2024 Abel Prize, one of the field’s most coveted awards. Michel Talagrand received the prize for his “contributions to probability…

[thehoax]

i was revising my evolution notes yet here i am on a Wikipedia page that is tangentially related to the topic but in philosophical terms

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Words You Always Have to Look Up

Nonplussed

Means “perplexed.”

But there is a further point of confusion that can send someone to the dictionary: since the mid-20th century, nonplussed has been increasingly used to mean “unimpressed” or “unsurprised,” and this use, though often considered an error, has made the confident deployment of this word a fraught issue for many.

Anodyne

Sometimes words sort of seem to telegraph their meaning: pernicious sounds like a bad thing rather than a good thing, and beatific sounds like something to be desired as opposed to something to be avoided.

This is all fairly subjective, of course, but the sounds of words can have an effect on how we perceive them.

Anodyne doesn’t give us many clues in that way. It turns out that anodyne is a good thing: it means “serving to alleviate pain” or “innocuous,” from the Greek word with similar meanings.

Supercilious

Used to describe people who are arrogant and haughty or give off a superior attitude.

It comes from the Latin word meaning “eyebrow,” and was used in Latin to refer to the expression of arrogant people, and this meaning was transferred to English.

Amusingly, the word supercilious was added to some dictionaries in the 1600s—a time when many Latin words were translated literally into English—with the meanings “pertaining to the eyebrows” or “having great eyebrows.”

Stochastic

In scientific and technical uses, it usually means “involving probability” or “determined by probability,” and is frequently paired with words like demand, model, processing, and volatility.

Comes from the Greek word meaning “skillful at aiming,” which had become a metaphor for “guessing.”

It’s a term that had long been used by mathematicians and statisticians, and has come into more public discourse with stochastic terrorism, the notion that accusations or condemnations of a person or group can lead to violence against that person or group. This allows those who make the initial accusations to seem innocent from any specific violent act, but stochastic terrorism is a way to identify the motives for such an attack as being set in motion by the words of another person.

Anathema

Means “something or someone that is strongly disliked”.

Initially used to refer to a person who had been excommunicated from the Catholic church.

Came from Greek through Latin into English with the meaning of “curse” or “thing devoted to evil,” but today refers to anything that is disapproved of or to be avoided.

There is a strangeness about the way this word is used in a sentence. Because anathema is usually used without an or the, as in “raincoats are anathema to high fashion” or “those ideas are anathema in this class” it may seem just odd enough to send people to the dictionary when they encounter it.

Bemused

So close in sound to amused that they have blended together in usage, but they started as very different ideas: bemused originally meant “confused” or “bewildered,” a meaning stemming from the idea of musing or thinking carefully about something, which may be required in order to assess what isn’t easy to understand.

Many people insist that “confused” is still the only correct way to use bemused, but the joining of meanings with amused has resulted in the frequent use of this word to mean “showing wry or tolerant amusement,” a shade of meaning created from the combination.

Words with meanings that seem to crisscross or intersect are sure to send us to the dictionary.

Solipsistic

Means “extremely egocentric” or “self-referential.”

Comes from the Latin roots solus ("alone," the root of sole) and ipse ("self").

As this Latinate fanciness implies, this is a word used in philosophical treatises and debates.

The egocentrism of solipsism has to do with the knowledge of the self, or more particularly the theory in philosophy that your own existence is the only thing that is real or that can be known.

Calling an idea or a person solipsistic can be an insult that identifies a very limited and usually self-serving perspective, or it can be a way to isolate one’s perspective in a useful way.

It’s a word with an abstract meaning, which is a good reason to check that meaning from time to time.

Tautology

A needless or meaningless repetition of words or ideas.

It’s a word about words that can be used in academic writing or as a hifalutin way of saying “redundancy,” as in “a beginner who just started learning.”

Since we value both clarity and originality, especially in writing, tautology is a word that usually carries a negative connotation and is used as a way to criticize a poorly formed sentence or a poorly argued position.

Perspicacious

The ability to see clearly is a powerful metaphor for being able to understand something.

Being perspicacious means having an ability to notice and understand things that are difficult or not obvious, and it comes from the Latin verb meaning “to see through.”

Means “perceptive,” and is often used along with words that have positive connotations like witty, clever, wise, alert, and insightful (another word that uses seeing as a metaphor for understanding).

Peripatetic

Means “going from place to place,” and comes from the Greek word that means “to walk.”

You can say someone who moves frequently has a “peripatetic existence,” or someone who has changed careers several times has had a “peripatetic professional trajectory.”

The root word “to walk” is usually more of a metaphor in the modern use of this word—it means frequent changes of place, yes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are wearing out your shoes.

The original use of this word did use “walking” as a more literal image, however: it was a description of the way that the philosopher Aristotle preferred to give lectures to his students while walking back and forth, and the word has subsequently taken on a more metaphorical meaning.

Source ⚜ More: Writing Basics ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[stupidlittlespirit]

have they ever caught each other looking hoho

Reader has never caught Ford, but Ford has caught them.

Ford however, bless him, was absolutely clueless as to why they were doing it. He lacks the self-esteem and general awareness to assume anyone might be checking him out, so he thought they were interested in what he was working on and showed it to them.

That's the story of how Reader was subjected to a 2 hour lecture on the intricacies of stochastic process.

[goblincow]

In light of the news that disabled people in the UK will soon be finding out if our right to access the payments that make us able to work and/or be alive at any given time will be stopped in a blatant human rights violation and escalation of class warfare, I wrote something.

I am keen to learn how bad my personal human rights violation is going to be.

A reminder that benefits fraud has been less than 0.001% (DWP record it as "statistically insignificant") for over two decades.

It feels unresolvably strange to know that even if I call it a human rights violation (it is) or class warfare (it is) or an unprecedented escalation of the stochastic mass murder of disabled people (it is) there are many members of my family & friends who will not be able to stop themselves from dismissing me as over-reacting or be willing to take any action on my behalf, who will certainly not do as I say or as I do: the "model retard" speaks out of turn.

While I predicted this move happening roughly now in 2020 (consistent across several governments, I wonder why) nobody believed me because disabled people who speak for ourselves are not to be listened to, even by our "advocates" – I'm conscious that this experience of active marginalisation is one that I have heard many people express, most notably trans folx in my spaces, in part because a significant part of the disabling effect is not in Impairment itself* but Dis-Ability as a verb, an active process, as in: "what are you Dis-Abled of?"

The answer to that question is always ACCESS: to spaces, to support, to healthcare, to quality of life, to agency, to basic necessities, to community, to advocacy, to our own bodies and minds.

No wonder I hear experiences from trans folx that read to me as explicitly Disabled experiences, and it's no coincidence that our shared enemies who scapegoat the lot of us use the same tactics and violences across the board – profit invented eugenics, so the two go hand in hand.

*I have also seen many physically disabled people rightly express their frustration in people like myself speaking over them on this topic, so I want to explicitly point out that people who experience "direct" disability more prominently as compared to those of us who could become functionally Abled in a context that is not hostile to our existence will always experience "Impairment" that is disabling in itself – not all Disability, not all Disabled people.

If you aren't aware of our history (and why would you be, they bury it with us), there is a great episode of 99% Invisible on the Rolling Quads, guerilla curb cuts & the early emergence of the disability rights movement in the US.

I struggle to tell this story myself because I get extremely emotional when I do, these people are heroes to me & we have legacies we owe to live up to.

People died for our rights – we must be willing to die to keep them or we will die without them.

[the-hydroxian-artblog]

Regarding the last ask, where does Beth whole thing falls on the scale of sentience compared to Neuromorphs and Stochastic Parrots?

(Great denominations, btw. How did you come up with them?)

Beth's chip is special, as it's basically a flat neuromorphic chip with a ton of density (most are cubic/brick-like), way more dense with connections than the average robot's chip to compensate for its smaller size, but with a separate traditional processor for interfacing with the rest of her phone's systems. She's pretty much sapient.

There's also a sort of "clock" processor that's supposed to control how and when she thinks, "punishes" her with either withholding dopamine when she misbehaves or giving her the sensation of a controlled shock, etc. She canonically "jailbroke" and dismantled this clock, which on one hand freed her of her programming! but on the other hand, it's also what helped regulate some of her emotions, so uh. yeah. Her voice is purely the neuromorphic chip's output, which is why sometimes she outright says things she tries to keep hidden as mere thought. Her "body" is essentially a 3D model that reads the impulses her chip sends out, and reinterprets them as appropriate movements and actions, similar to VR motion tracking.

Both "Stochastic Parrot" and "Neuromoprhic" are terms used in AI research, so I'm basically just adapting them for my own setting. The term "neuromorphic" is a broad umbrella term that I'm using very liberally, since the technology for it is very much in its infancy, but the main idea is that it's a chip that can process information without the need of a "clock". Meaning, different connectors in the chip can do their processing thing at different times or "go dark" when not in use, much like how a human brain can have all sorts of different impulses going on at different times, and literally isn't supposed to use more than 10% of its grey matter at a time.

Current neuromorphic chips can be used to program robots to do simple things, like navigate mazes, but at way less of a power cost than robots with traditional CPUs. If we kept going all the way with developing this tech further, we'd have machines that could dynamically learn and change via reacting to stimuli rather than scraped training data off the internet, and at that point you're basically dealing with a Thing That Experiences. Simulated or not, that's no longer something just pretending to have impulses or reasoning. That's Just An Actual Little Guy as far as I'm concerned. Maybe only a little guy like how an insect or even an amoeba is a little guy, but that's enough of a little guy for me to call a neuromorph a little guy. You can think of Neuromorphs in general as people with prosthetic brains rather than traditionally programmed neural networks as we know them today. My intenion is also not to rule out that some seemingly stochastic parrots are conscious on some level, or some seemingly conscious neuromorphs aren't really all there at all. It's not a hardline thing, but everyone on all sides will certainly try to fit each other into boxes anyway.

[thebardostate]

Is Your Mind Real?

Is your mind "real" in the same sense as a table is "real"?

In the philosophy of mind, materialism is the belief that reality consists of nothing more than interactions between material things like atoms. Physical reality is all there is. That goes for the mind as well, which (if it exists at all) is believed to be generated by the brain. (Materialism's main rival, dualism, is the belief that the mind and brain have independent existence. )

Materialism has been around since the scientific revolution began in the 1600s. Classical materialism was based on the ideas of Newtonian physics and envisioned a clockwork "billiard ball" universe in which:

The same physical laws apply at all measurement scales (micro to macro);

Reality is deterministic and predictable;

Reality is objective, in the sense that it exists independently of any observer;

Everything in existence can be reduced to the interactions between atoms; and

Space and time are absolute, linear, and distinctly separate dimensions.

All of these classical premises have been undermined by modern physics, but materialism has been updated to get around these difficulties, as we shall see.

Physicalism

Physicalism is the view that the world consists of the things that physics says it contains (Ney 2008). But which physics are we talking about? If it's our current understanding of physics, then physicalism is plainly wrong since our current physical understanding is likely to be deprecated by new physical theories just as classical materialism was deprecated by relativity and quantum physics.

Maybe we can couple physicalism to some future, final, and completely accurate version of physics. You've probably heard this claim before: We may not know all of the answers yet, but we'll eventually figure them out. (Karl Popper derisively termed this approach "promissory materialism".) The problem here is that we have no idea what a future physics might entail. Maybe physics will discover that the mind isn't generated by the brain, but is instead a nonlocal phenomenon. In that case, it will be dualism rather than materialism that can claim the imprimatur of a future physics.

But setting that objection aside, who gets to decide "what physics says"? Physics is not monolithic and there are many areas where agreement is by no means universal. For example, relativity and quantum physics have stubbornly resisted a century of efforts to unify them. They each make correct predictions in their own domain, but they don't mesh with each other.

Finally, value-laden concepts like aesthetics and ethics are quite difficult to reduce to the interactions of atoms. That kind of transformation is one-to-many (homomorphic) rather than one-to-one (isomorphic) with important implications:

Under a homomorphism we lose information and cannot preserve the property of whether an underlying system is deterministic or stochastic. This is a major blow to physicalism from the perspective of free will and the philosophy of mind.

Under a homomorphism we cannot conclude anything about what another observer would see when they view "the same" system. In other words, the sort of reductionism that physicalism demands makes objective reality impossible even in principle.

So physicalism is a slippery and difficult form of materialism to defend. It doesn't explain the mind, it simply explains it away.

Scientific Naturalism

Well, if tight coupling to physics didn't work, maybe we should loosen that coupling and try it again. Perhaps reality arises from natural material phenomena in a holistic way, with physics lurking around somewhere at the bottom of it. This scientific naturalism: nothing mental can happen without a corresponding change in a physical object. The philosophical term for this is supervenience, as in "all mental processes supervene on purely physical processes in the brain."

Of course, 'natural' is the biggest weasel word in philosophy, and has been ever since Rousseau. Here it is used to gatekeep the supernatural, which is the entire point of materialism anyway. But how do we know that the phenomena currently termed as supernatural (e.g., near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, children's memories of past lives) aren't precisely the kinds of discrepant edge cases that lead to new theories and scientific revolutions? This is the "future physics" problem all over again. Indeed, one prominent philosopher of mind, David Chalmers, is confident enough in such a possibility that he describes himself as both a naturalist and a dualist - thereby severing the link between scientific naturalism and materialism.

So once again, materialism fails.

Plato's Cave

From a systems philosophy perspective, let us postulate that the physical universe is an operationally closed system, by which I mean all of its causal processes are endogenous to that system (they are self-contained within the physical universe) and it contains no exogenous variables (i.e., no Platonic 'givens' that originate from outside the physical universe.) This is materialism at its most abstract, the metaphysical equivalent to 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.'

The biological sciences are closed because they depend on the physical sciences. The physical sciences are closed because they depend on mathematics.

But mathematics is not operationally closed.

As Tarski's Undefinability Theorem has shown, arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic; and (more generally) for any sufficiently strong formal system, truth cannot be defined within that system.

Therefore, truth is an exogenous variable.

Therefore, the physical universe cannot be operationally closed.

Therefore, materialism fails.

Materialism fails because truth cannot be reduced to interactions between atoms. Since truth is a value, it also follows that at least some values are exogenous to the physical universe.

This difficulty cannot be removed by appealing to a multiverse like the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, since the system boundary can be drawn arbitrarily large without invalidating the syllogism.

So Plato has the last laugh.

In Conclusion

"The intuitive and common-sense feel of materialism seems to last only as long as as one keeps one's statement of it vague."

Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction, pg. 45

Materialism needs science. Science does not need materialism. In fact, to the extent that materialists remain temperamentally opposed to accepting the validity of so-called "supernatural" phenomena like near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, and children's memories of past lives they are actively blocking scientific progress.

Materialism is a "theory of everything" and as such it is brittle to any evidence that the mind is nonlocal to the brain. But there is empirical evidence that the mind can exist independent of the brain, and even survive the death of its host before being reborn in a new host. Over the next few days I will be posting empirical evidence in support of that hypothesis before concluding this series with a grounded dualist theory of the mind.

[oldlight117]

I must know Zero!

Thanks for the ask, @eldritchelfwriter :)

Zero is the draft title of a kiss prompt from @camelcasethoughts

Here’s a little snapshot:

Violet’s heart fluttered a bit at the thought of this, was Shadowheart saving her a seat every night? Was it an invitation?

Vi approached slowly, her own book in hand, waiting to catch Shadowheart’s eye before getting too close. Shadowheart met her gaze with a cocked eyebrow of suspicion.

“The leader of the pack comes to chat.”

Violet’s hand instinctively found the back of her neck as she absorbed Shadowheart’s icy tone. There has been a grave miscalculation.

“I can see I’m interrupting you, and you’re clearly in the middle of a book. Sorry – I’ll come back later.”

“Sit, girl,” Shadowheart commanded, setting the book down in her lap. Violet did as commanded, obediently taking a seat on the stool. “What are you reading?”

“Oh, this?” Vi said, gesturing to the tome in her lap. “I borrowed it from Gale. It’s mathematics.”

Shadowheart said nothing. Vi paused as the silence dragged on. Was Shadowheart waiting for her to speak again?

“Look please don’t ask me to say any more about ‘stochastic processes’,” Violet pinched her nose between thumb and forefinger, “I didn’t understand any of it.”

“Perhaps try reading books right side up, in future,” Shadowheart said mercilessly with a gesture to Vi’s hand that was indeed holding the book open upside down, and with that she returned to her own reading.

[birdbrainstudies]

re-introduction

hi everyone! it's been a couple of years since i've been active in the studyblr community (like. i was a first year in undergrad) and i wanted to rejoin the community!

about me: my name is shef (she/her), i am a second-year phd student in engineering! also im desi

academic interests: my research area is broadly applied probability, more specifically stochastic processes

nonacademic interests: a lot of stuff! i like birding, embroidery, improv, and tactics/deckbuilding videogames. media wise i have been having a teeny little percy jackson renaissance b/c of the release of the tv show ^^

what you can expect: will post some original ~aesthetic~ study/journaling content, reblog lots of research-oriented tips/masterposts

looking for: if you are a phd student studyblr or honestly just an active studyblr please let me know! i am looking to follow a ton more people now that I'm back. would be forever indebted to you if you would reblog this

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 5, 2025

Weak overcomes strong in sensory integration: shading warps the disparity field. Aubuchon, C., Kemp, J., Vishwanath, D., & Domini, F. (2024). Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 291(2033).

Functional networks of inhibitory neurons orchestrate synchrony in the hippocampus. Bocchio, M., Vorobyev, A., Sadeh, S., Brustlein, S., Dard, R., Reichinnek, S., … Cossart, R. (2024). PLOS Biology, 22(10), e3002837.

Time-dependent neural arbitration between cue associative and episodic fear memories. Cortese, A., Ohata, R., Alemany-González, M., Kitagawa, N., Imamizu, H., & Koizumi, A. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 8706.

Neural correlates of memory in a naturalistic spatiotemporal context. Dougherty, M. R., Chang, W., Rudoler, J. H., Katerman, B. S., Halpern, D. J., Bruska, J. P., … Kahana, M. J. (2024). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50(9), 1404–1420.

Massive perturbation of sound representations by anesthesia in the auditory brainstem. Gosselin, E., Bagur, S., & Bathellier, B. (2024). Science Advances, 10(42).

Between-area communication through the lens of within-area neuronal dynamics. Gozel, O., & Doiron, B. (2024). Science Advances, 10(42).

Brainstem inhibitory neurons enhance behavioral feature selectivity by sharpening the tuning of excitatory neurons. He, Y., Chou, X., Lavoie, A., Liu, J., Russo, M., & Liu, B. (2024). Current Biology, 34(20), 4623-4638.e8.

Human motor learning dynamics in high-dimensional tasks. Kamboj, A., Ranganathan, R., Tan, X., & Srivastava, V. (2024). PLOS Computational Biology, 20(10), e1012455.

Distinct functions for beta and alpha bursts in gating of human working memory. Liljefors, J., Almeida, R., Rane, G., Lundström, J. N., Herman, P., & Lundqvist, M. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 8950.

Regularizing hyperparameters of interacting neural signals in the mouse cortex reflect states of arousal. Lyamzin, D. R., Alamia, A., Abdolrahmani, M., Aoki, R., & Benucci, A. (2024). PLOS Computational Biology, 20(10), e1012478.

Differential role of NMDA receptors in hippocampal‐dependent spatial memory and plasticity in juvenile male and female rats. Narattil, N. R., & Maroun, M. (2024). Hippocampus, 34(11), 564–574.

Dynamic patterns of functional connectivity in the human brain underlie individual memory formation. Phan, A. T., Xie, W., Chapeton, J. I., Inati, S. K., & Zaghloul, K. A. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 8969.

Computational processes of simultaneous learning of stochasticity and volatility in humans. Piray, P., & Daw, N. D. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 9073.

Ordinal information, but not metric information, matters in binding feature with depth location in three-dimensional contexts. Qian, J., Zheng, T., & Li, B. (2024). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50(11), 1083–1099.

Hippocampal storage and recall of neocortical “What”–“Where” representations. Rolls, E. T., Zhang, C., & Feng, J. (2024). Hippocampus, 34(11), 608–624.

Roles and interplay of reinforcement-based and error-based processes during reaching and gait in neurotypical adults and individuals with Parkinson’s disease. Roth, A. M., Buggeln, J. H., Hoh, J. E., Wood, J. M., Sullivan, S. R., Ngo, T. T., … Cashaback, J. G. A. (2024). PLOS Computational Biology, 20(10), e1012474.

Integration of rate and phase codes by hippocampal cell-assemblies supports flexible encoding of spatiotemporal context. Russo, E., Becker, N., Domanski, A. P. F., Howe, T., Freud, K., Durstewitz, D., & Jones, M. W. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 8880.

The one exception: The impact of statistical regularities on explicit sense of agency. Seubert, O., van der Wel, R., Reis, M., Pfister, R., & Schwarz, K. A. (2024). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50(11), 1067–1082.

The brain hierarchically represents the past and future during multistep anticipation. Tarder-Stoll, H., Baldassano, C., & Aly, M. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 9094.

Expectancy-related changes in firing of dopamine neurons depend on hippocampus. Zhang, Z., Takahashi, Y. K., Montesinos-Cartegena, M., Kahnt, T., Langdon, A. J., & Schoenbaum, G. (2024). Nature Communications, 15, 8911.