Three-Toed Sloth

It's Not Who You Know, It's What You Do

Blog near-silence will continue until bootstrap testing results improve. In the meanwhile, it occurs to me that I haven't mentioned that I have a new paper.

CRS, Marcelo F. Camperi and Kristina Lisa Klinkner, "Discovering Functional Communities in Dynamical Networks", q-bio.NC/0609008, forthcoming in the proceedings of the ICML 2006 workshop on "Statistical Network Analysis: Models, Issues and New Directions" (Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Abstract: Many networks are important because they are substrates for dynamical systems, and their pattern of functional connectivity can itself be dynamic — they can functionally reorganize, even if their underlying anatomical structure remains fixed. However, the recent rapid progress in discovering the community structure of networks has overwhelmingly focused on that constant anatomical connectivity. In this paper, we lay out the problem of discovering functional communities, and describe an approach to doing so. This method combines recent work on measuring information sharing across stochastic networks with an existing and successful community-discovery algorithm for weighted networks. We illustrate it with an application to a large biophysical model of the transition from beta to gamma rhythms in the hippocampus.

Thanks — over and above the acknowledgments in the paper &mdash are due to Jörg Reichardt for help implementing his algorithm, and to Anna Goldenberg for very thorough (not to mention patient!) editing, resulting in a much better paper.

There are about a zillion possible extensions and applications, which is a good note on which to get back to work.

Networks; Self-Centered; Minds, Brains, and Neurons