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“Relevance”

Date:

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Time:

Thursday, 03. Mayl 2018

Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support

- Video.mp4 (ca.379 Mb)

15:15 – 16:15

Matteo Marsili

(ICTP)

Abstract :

The mass is a relevant variable in experiments of free falling bodies, their colour is not.

The mass enters the laws that governs how objects fall, their colour does not.

How can one identify relevant variables when data is scarce and high dimensional and

the laws that govern the phenomena under study are unknown? In order to address

this question, I will first argue that relevance can be quantified unambiguously in

information theoretic terms, on the basis of a data alone. Samples with maximal relevance,

i.e. those which are mostly informative about the generative process, exhibit power

law distributions, suggesting a possible origin for the ubiquitous observation of such

distributions. In addition, this opens the way to model free approaches to extract relevant

information from high dimensional datasets. This will be illustrated in the cases of protein

sequences and multi-electrode arrays recording of neural activity.