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Tuesday 1 September

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

iPINN for Broadband CARS Phase Retrieval: A Framework for Function Approximation and Inverse Modeling Problems in Nonlinear Spectroscopy

Phase retrieval in broadband coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (BCARS) is an ill-posed inverse problem. The Raman-like signal is encoded in the imaginary part of the resonant susceptibility, which mixes coherently with a non-resonant background (NRB) that varies across acquisitions. We introduce an inverse physics-informed neural network (iPINN) that predicts Lorentzian peak parameters from raw BCARS spectra and reconstructs the resonant susceptibility through a differentiable analytical forward model. A transformer encoder assigns spectral features to 24 learnable peak slots, and a multi-view consistency loss enforces invariance across NRB pattern, NRB strength, and noise. Unlike direct spectral regression approaches, the method retains accuracy under varying acquisition conditions. On a public benchmark, iPINN achieves the lowest error among the tested baselines (MAE 0.016 vs. next-best 0.046). On 28 zero-shot test spectra acquired across seven solvents and four focal positions, accuracy is depth-invariant in five of seven solvents. These results show that inverse parametric prediction with a differentiable physical decoder supports robust phase retrieval across measurement conditions.
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All authors Ravi Teja Vulchi, Carl Messerschmidt, Mohammadsadegh Vafaeinezhad, Rajendhar Junjuri, Tobias Meyer-Zedler, Juergen Popp, Thomas Bocklitz

Monday 31 August

Data Analysis and Statistics

Parameter inference from a non-stationary unknown process using statistical feature-based slow feature analysis

Non-stationary phenomena are ubiquitous, with examples to be found in climatological measurements, brain activity, and the behavior of financial markets. Starting with a time series from a non-stationary process, a key challenge is to infer the time-varying parameters that underlie the non-stationarity in these systems, without requiring a generative model of the dynamics to be learned. This problem is referred to as Parameter Inference from a Non-stationary Unknown Process (PINUP). Here we introduce a PINUP method called feature-based Slow Feature Analysis (f -SFA) comprising the computation of time-series features across sliding windows, followed by dimension reduction using slow feature analysis (SFA). This allows us to detect slow variation in a potentially wide range of statistical properties of the measured dynamics on a timescale determined by the window length. Crucially, using a comprehensive time-series feature set avoids the subjectivity of feature selection, while the SFA slowness constraint overcomes the bias towards irrelevant correlated features seen with variance-based dimension reduction. The performance of f -SFA surpasses that of four benchmark PINUP methods across a diverse range of non-stationary chaotic processes, and we explore the impact of various parameters on performance, including observation noise, parameter timescales, parameter amplitudes, and unseen parameter values. Further, applying f -SFA to sleep polysomnography data, we show that it is able to infer a time-varying parameter underlying the non-stationary sleep recordings that closely tracks depth of sleep. To our knowledge, this work presents the first comparative study of PINUP methods, and we demonstrate that f -SFA is a simple, effective, and noise-robust approach for quantifying non-stationarity from time series, that can be applied in a range of fields.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from hep-ph

Anomaly detection for multijet scenarios

Signals of physics beyond the Standard Model continue to resist discovery at the LHC. Recent years have seen the proliferation of new anomaly detection techniques, promising discovery with significantly fewer model assumptions than traditional approaches. Strategies based on weak supervision have been especially successful, but so far were largely limited in scope by their reliance on a resonance manifesting a decay into a pair of jets. In this work, we demonstrate that a well-established idea from jet substructure physics - recursive soft drop - in combination with the CATHODE technique for anomaly detection can be used to simultaneously perform anomaly detection for signals with an arbitrary number of jets in the final state, greatly increasing the scope of such searches.
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All authors Gregor Kasieczka, Sung Hak Lim, Louis Moureaux, Tore von Schwartz, David Shih, Chitrakshee Yede

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.acc-ph

Modernization and Statistical Validation of a Multilayer TRIM.SP Code for Low-Energy Muon and Ion Implantation

We describe the staged modernization of a local multilayer TRIM.SP implementation, denoted TRIM.SP-NL. The work included behavior-preserving refactoring, correction of localized bookkeeping and initialization defects, support for more than five elements per layer, reproducible build modes, and a runtime-selectable random-number-generator (RNG) interface. The RANLUX RNG remains the default reference backend, while PCG32 and xoshiro256** provide faster alternatives without changing the input-deck format. The code validation combined exact regression testing with statistical comparisons over 13 representative target multilayer configurations, comprising 143 energy-configuration points per backend and 429 simulations in total. Across the test suite, PCG32 and xoshiro256** reduced runtime by factors of 1.98 and 2.01, respectively. The implanted, backscattered, and transmitted fractions, as well as the mean implantation depths, range straggling, and representative depth profiles showed no systematic RNG dependence. Together with a Node.js-based graphical interface for setup, scans, and result collection, the Fortran engine forms the open-source TRIM.SP-NL Workbench.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.CO

Cosmic variance and ergodicity in finite systems with correlations

We consider the difference between ensemble and volume average in cosmology. It is known that for sufficiently weak long-range correlations the root mean square of the difference, which we call ergodicity bias, decays like $R^{-3/2}$ in the limit of large volume $R^3$. We calculate the condition this imposes on the power spectrum of a Gaussian random field. We quantify the bias for finite $R$, and show that the $R\to\infty$ limit is of little relevance for cosmological observations when the measured scales and correlations extend to the size of the observable universe. We consider curvature, density, and velocity perturbations. On large scales the bias is important in all three cases. For the density perturbations, which are observationally the most relevant, the relative bias first exceeds 100% at the separation $r=177$ Mpc, and is larger than 100% for all $r>560$ Mpc. It should be taken into account when comparing ensemble and volume averages for large-scale structure. The bias is also large for the cosmic microwave background temperature perturbations on large angular scales, but this is not relevant for observations, as their analysis does not involve volume averaging.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.med-ph

Unimodality and Radial Monotonicity of the Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting T1/T2 Matching Objective

Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) estimates tissue parameters by matching an acquired MR signal time course to entries in a Bloch- or EPG-simulated dictionary. However, no study has yet proven the uniqueness of the matching results. In two earlier studies by exhaustive objective mapping I showed that for two widely used MRF sequences the normalized-correlation objective exhibits a single dominant peak at the true T1/T2 values and decreases smoothly away from that peak. These empirical properties motivated the fast MRF-ZOOM search algorithm even without using a pre-generated signal dictionary, but their theoretical basis has remained incomplete. The purpose of this work is to develop a mathematical framework for the MRF matching objective under normalized-correlation matching.
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Sunday 30 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.IM

A generalized likelihood model for segmented muon counters

Measurements of the muonic component of extensive air showers constrain cosmic-ray mass composition and hadronic interactions at energies beyond those accessible at accelerators. Arrays of segmented detectors with binary readout are widely used for this purpose: they sample the muon density at different distances from the shower core to reconstruct the muon lateral distribution function (LDF). Each detector response is summarized by the number of activated segments, $k$, whose probability distribution provides the likelihood relating the observation to the expected muon content. Signal pile-up, detector inefficiency, corner-clipping muons, and background signals shape this distribution, and neglecting them can bias the reconstruction. Existing analytical models include pile-up but otherwise assume an ideal detector response. In this work, we develop a unified statistical framework that incorporates inefficiency, corner clipping, and background through a small set of physically interpretable parameters. We derive exact expressions for the detector response and the likelihood required for muon-LDF reconstruction, together with a simple binomial approximation that preserves the main statistical properties of the exact distribution. Dedicated Monte Carlo simulations are used to assess the impact of the assumptions underlying the analytical treatment and show that it is negligible over the parameter range considered. They also show that the exact and approximate likelihoods yield similar performance in terms of estimator bias and confidence-interval coverage. Although motivated by the Underground Muon Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory, the framework applies more broadly to segmented particle detectors with binary readout in which particle content is inferred from the number of activated segments.
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All authors Joaquín de Jesús, Juan Manuel Figueira, Federico Sanchez, Darko Veberic

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.soc-ph

ButterMamba: Butterworth-Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Mamba for Efficient Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate traffic flow prediction is fundamental to intelligent transportation systems, playing a pivotal role in urban mobility optimization and smart city development. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) integrated with time series forecasting have emerged as promising solutions, two critical limitations persist: (1) the quadratic complexity of attention-based architectures hinders real-time deployment in large-scale networks, and (2) high-frequency noise in sensor data significantly degrades prediction reliability. These challenges are particularly acute in metropolitan scenarios where both computational efficiency and noise robustness are paramount. To address these limitations, we introduce ButterMamba, a novel and efficient framework based on State Space Models (SSMs). ButterMamba consists of two key components: (1) a Butterworth Spectral Filtering module that preprocesses the data by removing high-frequency noise, allowing the model to focus on significant underlying trends, and (2) a Spatial-Temporal State Mixer that uses a parallel Mamba architecture to efficiently capture both long-range temporal dependencies and complex spatial correlations across the road network. By decoupling noise filtering from spatial-temporal modeling, ButterMamba achieves superior predictive accuracy with linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that ButterMamba not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy but also considerably reduces training time and memory usage.
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All authors Limiao Zhang, Yuhui Lu, Jie Gao, Hao Jiang, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang

Saturday 29 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from hep-lat

Detecting Multiple Phase Transitions in Lattice Systems with Intrinsic Dimensions

Lattice systems with multiple nearby transitions pose two related challenges: resolving distinct transition scales and identifying the degrees of freedom primarily associated with each transition. We show that the intrinsic dimension of Monte Carlo configuration ensembles, estimated by the two-nearest-neighbors method, provides a geometric diagnostic for both problems. In the two-dimensional $q$-state clock model, the intrinsic dimension distinguishes the ordered, quasi-critical, and disordered regimes for both well-separated ($q=9$) and closely spaced ($q=5$) Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transitions. In the $q=5$ case, the intermediate phase appears as a broad low-dimensional valley even when energy and magnetization do not separately resolve the two transitions. In the four-dimensional $U(1)$ Higgs model, we introduce channel-decomposed intrinsic dimensions based on gauge-invariant plaquette and Higgs variables. The dominant response of each channel tracks transitions associated with the corresponding degrees of freedom, while the combined channel retains features of both. We further show that intrinsic dimensions evaluated directly on gauge-variant fields are dominated by gauge-orbit directions, demonstrating the importance of removing gauge redundancy before interpreting configuration-space geometry. These results establish channel-decomposed intrinsic dimension as a geometric probe of lattice systems with multiple transitions and motivate its application to disentangling deconfinement and chiral crossover scales in full QCD.
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All authors Jie Mei, Tetsuo Hatsuda, Mei Huang, Lingxiao Wang

Friday 28 August

Data Analysis and Statistics

A Probability Model for Pentagonal Prism Dice Rolls

In the realm of probability theory and game design, the study of dice probabilities plays a crucial role. The featured dice are usually fair, so their probabilities can be predicted without rolling the dice. Pentagonal prismatic dice are not fair. Hence, the probabilities are more complicated. Our mathematical model is naturally derived from both the geometric properties of the dice and empirical evidence. Dice of varying sizes but with constant volume were designed. Using a 3D printer with 100 percent infill, the dice were printed and prepared. A machine that simulates dropping dice through a dice tower onto a hard surface was used to obtain about 41,000 results. From these data, a statistical model was constructed that gives probabilities of dice with varying height-to-radius ratios. The formula for the model is based on the centroid solid angle, but with two adjustment parameters due to varying energy and other requirements to transition between different resting aspects. Within the range of height-to-radius ratios tested, the data are within reasonable statistical error of the model.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Localizing Global Discrepancies: Marginal Contributions and Contextual Anomaly Detection

Global goodness-of-fit and discrepancy statistics can establish that a sample departs from a reference distribution without identifying which observations drive the departure. We develop a framework for this localization problem by assigning to each observation its conditional or marginal contribution across random statistical contexts. This connects resampling diagnostics and data valuation to projection theory and event-level anomaly detection. For symmetric statistics, fixed-size replacement is exactly equivalent to centered conditional localization. For U-statistics, the addition score equals the first Hoeffding/Hájek contribution; for smooth distributional functionals it is related at leading order to the influence function; and for unbiased known-background MMD it reduces exactly to the MMD witness. This viewpoint also yields more efficient estimators. Matched-context subtraction removes fluctuations unrelated to the observation, while for pairwise MMD the event-containing terms give a simple localizer. On the LHC Olympics anomaly-detection benchmark, the pair estimator converges to the direct empirical MMD witness with the predicted 1/(Rm^2) scaling, where m is batch size and R the number of batches. At m=1000 and R=5x106 it reaches correlation 0.9993 with essentially identical AUC. We also ask when context contains information beyond an event's own features. In a shared-latent toy model, the full single-event signal and background distributions are identical by construction, forcing isolated-event AUC=0.5. Discriminating information survives only in cross-event dependence induced by the shared latent parameter; the ensemble recovers this information, whereas an independent-latent control does not. This separates two roles of context: efficient localization of a global discrepancy and genuinely additional class information when the alternative contains shared structure.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from hep-ex

Vertex reconstruction for a search for neutron-antineutron conversions with HIBEAM

The HIBEAM/NNBAR programme (incorporated into the FINESSE/NNBAR programme) at the European Spallation Source is proposed to search for neutrons converting to antineutrons. An important observable is the reconstructed vertex arising from charged particles produced by an antineutron annihilating on a thin target foil and which pass through a time projection chamber. This paper studies track clustering and foil-plane vertex reconstruction for this topology. Both non-machine-learning methods and graph-neural-network methods are tested and compared with each other, including deterministic clustering, trackless projection and a hybrid clustering/graph-neural-network chain with track classification and vertex refinement. We conclude that, for the geometrically simple events in the HIBEAM TPC, classical reconstruction methods perform on-par with machine-learning based methods in terms of vertex coordinate reconstruction. Custom machine-learning based methods can, however, deliver event-shape information that may be important in downstream analyses.
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All authors Alexander Burgman, Sze Chun Yiu, Yamna Shaikh, David Milstead, Eily Merjy, Lucas Åstrand, Kenneth Österberg, Fredrik Oljemark, Bernhard Meirose, Matthias Holl, Valentina Santoro, Jorge Amaral, Ernesto Kemp, André Nepomuceno, Tiago Quirino, Joshua L. Barrow

Thursday 27 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Evaluating Quantum Kernel Methods for Track-Based Classification in High-Energy Physics

We present a systematic design for large-scale quantum kernel classification, demonstrated through a quantum support vector classifier (QSVC) for particle-track classification using centroid-based CLAS12 drift-chamber features. Each event is encoded into a six-qubit state via a fully entangled ZZFeatureMap, whose fidelities define a quantum kernel within a standard SVM framework. By decoupling state preparation from kernel construction and distributing evaluation across a multi-node MPI-based HPC allocation, the approach scales to 1.0x10^5 training and 4.0x10^5 test events with an exactly constructed kernel matrix, to our knowledge more than an order of magnitude larger than prior high-energy-physics quantum-kernel studies. Benchmarked against linear, polynomial, RBF, and sigmoid SVM kernels and extremely randomized trees (ERT), the ideal QSVC achieves the highest recall (99.99%) among all models. Under a calibrated hardware noise model (FakeMumbaiV2, 500 training / 2,000 test events), AUC falls from 0.9985 to 0.9671 and peak significance improvement falls from 17.5 to ~3.5, yet recall remains at 99.51% – indicating this signal-retention advantage is attenuated but not eliminated by circuit-level decoherence. Geometric analysis of the quantum embedding shows near-orthogonal inter-class states with coherent intra-class neighborhoods under ideal simulation; under noise this structure compresses toward the maximally mixed state while preserving its relative ordering. These results demonstrate a scalable, reproducible workflow for quantum kernel experimentation at HEP-relevant scale, quantifying the practical cost of realistic hardware noise on quantum-enhanced classification.
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Wednesday 26 August

Data Analysis and Statistics

Geometry-native machine learning reconstruction of DSMC moment fields with support monitoring

Direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) resolves rarefied-gas dynamics without a constitutive closure, but finite-sample estimates of macroscopic moments converge at markedly different rates. We develop a non-intrusive, geometry-native machine learning reconstruction of the retained two-dimensional moment hierarchy: number density, two velocity components, translational temperature, three pressure-tensor components, and two heat-flux components. From three sampling blocks, the estimator corrects a structured prior learned from development data with a bounded term computed from the current observation, while preserving additive-moment consistency and the measured zero-frequency content. In cavity development tests, the final observation-conditioned estimator, whose prior is a trained MambaIR restoration network, reduces transverse-heat-flux error to 0.658 and 0.672 times that of a ten-block direct average at two rarefied conditions. For a hypersonic cylinder, a cylinder-centred estimator is fixed before evaluation on six new observation/reference pairs. It improves both global transverse heat flux and near-wall normal heat flux in every pair; the ratios of arithmetic-mean normalised root-mean-square errors (NRMSEs) are 0.846 and 0.793, and the Holm-adjusted one-sided exact probabilities are 0.03125.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.CO

Cross-simulator transfer with foundation model summaries: Towards robust SKA-era reionization inference

Simulation-based inference (SBI) for parameter estimation is vulnerable to model misspecification: neural summaries and density estimators trained on a specific forward model typically fail when applied to data drawn from another model, or from real observations, and no training simulator can capture the full observational pipeline of a real measurement exactly. We show that a self-supervised Vision Transformer (ViT), pretrained label-free on a fast approximate simulator, produces transferable data summaries that generalize across simulators. Without retraining, it can be reused as a frozen encoder to infer astrophysical parameters from a completely different simulator that resolves the radiative transfer explicitly, on which it has never seen either data or parameters. As a concrete use case in 21cm cosmology, SKATR, a ViT pretrained with a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), serves as a foundation model for reionization inference from upcoming SKA measurements: SKATR is pretrained once on 67k low-cost, noiseless semi-numerical 21cmFAST lightcones, then frozen and applied to hydrodynamical Loreli II lightcones, where a lightweight conditional flow matching head infers five astrophysical parameters; the encoder is never shown Loreli data, its parameters, or any noise. In our comparison, SKATR yields the most precise and best-calibrated posteriors across all five parameters, matching the accuracy of the fully-supervised in-domain baseline while requiring 2.6x fewer radiative-transfer simulations. Under realistic SKA AA* noise, only SKATR remains simultaneously accurate, informative, and calibrated, outperforming even a supervised baseline retrained from scratch on noisy data. Self-supervised pretraining on computationally efficient semi-numerical simulations is therefore a viable route to calibrated, simulator- and noise-agnostic reionization inference for the SKA-era.
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All authors Yannic Pietschke, Caroline Heneka, Ayodele Ore, Romain Meriot

Tuesday 25 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from hep-ex

Binary Hypothesis Testing: A Robust Framework Against the Look Elsewhere Effect

In particle physics, discovery claims conventionally require an observed significance exceeding $5\sigma$. However, the interpretation of a $5\sigma$ result depends critically on the testing procedure, namely whether the hypothesis is tested at a single pre-specified point in parameter space or by scanning over a range of possible signal locations. This distinction gives rise to the look-elsewhere effect, a concept that is widely used but often interpreted as a simple penalty for scanning. In this work, we reinterpret the look-elsewhere effect as a correction for procedural inconsistency arising when the null distribution is generated under one procedure while the test statistic is evaluated under another. Within the framework of hypothesis testing, we examine its implications and clarify the distinct roles of the look-elsewhere effect in binary and peak-search scenarios. In particular, we show that binary test is robust against the look-elsewhere effect, whereas peak searches require an explicit correction for the search over signal locations. Using a moderate trial factor of approximately 26, calibrated from the ATLAS Higgs search, we show that a $3\sigma$ global significance of peak search can correspond to approximately $4\sigma$ significance of the binary test for the same value of the observed test statistic. This reformulation provides a clearer statistical interpretation of the look-elsewhere effect and offers a more coherent framework for understanding significance claims in particle physics.
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All authors Han Zhang, Xue-feng Ding, Yu-Feng Li, Yi-fang Wang, Liang-jian Wen, Liang Zhan

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.GA

Decoupling candidate dual AGN from chance superpositions in the GOTHIC survey via a deep-learning framework

Dual active galactic nuclei (DAGN) mark a critical phase in the evolution of merging galaxies and the pairing of supermassive black holes, yet they remain difficult to identify in large imaging surveys because of projection effects and limited spatial resolution. Compact foreground stars and unresolved substructure can mimic dual nuclei through chance superposition, complicating automated detection. We revisit the 46,061 galaxies flagged but rejected as DAGN candidates by the GOTHIC pipeline, primarily because the two nuclei fell within the SDSS fibre aperture or exceeded its separation threshold. We train a supervised deep-learning framework based on the YOLOv11 oriented-bounding-box architecture on annotated SDSS imaging to separate genuine dual nuclei from foreground stellar contaminants and other spurious alignments. The final model attains a validation precision of 0.919, recall of 0.905, and $F_1$ of 0.912 for the dual-nuclei class, and yields 29,605 dual-nucleus candidates after removing star-dominated and blended detections. Structured visual inspection indicates that $54.5$–$62\%$ are consistent with genuine dual nuclei, implying $\sim(1.4$–$1.8)\times10^{4}$ plausible systems. Cross-calibrating the YOLO separation against the deterministic GOTHIC centroid measurement and restricting to the compact regime ($d \le 6.87''$) gives a conservative subset of $\sim 13{,}672$ candidates, reaching calibrated separations of $\sim 0.56''$. Spectroscopy of the most compact ($\le 1$~kpc) systems shows they are dominated by passive, absorption-line galaxies with no resolved double-peaked emission, so confirmation requires higher-resolution follow-up. The catalogue is a statistically refined list of candidates, not confirmed DAGN. Nonetheless, deep-learning detection substantially reduces contamination and expands the plausible DAGN census.
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All authors Bhavesh Mukheja, Snehanshu Saha, Anwesh Bhattacharya, Mousumi Das, Françoise Combes, Sudhanshu Barway

Monday 24 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.ao-ph

Persistent memory and tail-risk amplification in Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation variability: a Volterra integral framework calibrated with CMIP6

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) carries multi-decadal memory that ensemble-mean risk projections do not capture. We quantify this memory and its consequences for tail risk with a Volterra integral framework applied to ensemble-mean-subtracted variability in 14 CMIP6 models (1850-2100, three SSP scenarios), so that results reflect intrinsic thermohaline memory rather than the common anthropogenic forcing trend. Four results follow from leave-one-out cross-validation and an annealed-quenched tail decomposition. First, the ensemble-mean DFA1 Hurst exponent is H = 0.781 +/- 0.219, with 12 of 14 models showing long-range dependence (H > 0.5), consistent with thermohaline adjustment timescales near 33 yr. Second, a first-order Volterra model reduces out-of-sample RMSE by 16.8% over the best autoregressive baseline and by 12.3% over an unconstrained 20-lag distributed baseline, both robust to 200 circular-shift placebos (p < 0.05): the physically motivated kernel shape carries genuine predictive advantage. Third, the rolling 30-year lower-tail frequency rises 1.9-3.1x above the historical baseline depending on scenario, and the memory amplification index exceeds 1 in 8 of 14 models under SSP5-8.5 (median 1.15): persistence-driven clustering of weak-AMOC states amplifies tail frequency beyond forcing-only projections. Fourth, model-specific optimal memory horizons (15-52 yr) correlate with thermohaline regime (r = 0.74, p < 0.01), and the ensemble-mean Hurst exponent already exceeds a detection threshold H* = 0.70 in 9 of 14 models, with theoretical lead times to near-tipping conditions of 10-35 yr depending on scenario. These results support trajectory-specific, memory-aware AMOC risk assessment under moderate-to-high forcing and a physically grounded, scenario-conditional early-warning framework.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from hep-ex

Differentiable Parametric Simulation and Reconstruction Models in Parnassus

Parnassus is a framework for fast detector simulation and reconstruction, directly mapping truth-level particles onto reconstructed objects. Such models can be built from deep generative networks trained on paired samples, which are fit automatically to a target detector, or from parametric prescriptions of the kind used by Delphes, which are constructed by hand. We remove this asymmetry by making the parametric models fully differentiable so that their parameters can be fit to a target sample by gradient descent. We demonstrate closure by fitting a parametric model to samples from a known configuration of itself, recovering the generating parameters and characterizing the degeneracies among them, and we present a first fit to CMS full simulation. The resulting models are interpretable, inexpensive, and run in the standard Parnassus pipeline which is fully Python based and GPU enabled.
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All authors Abdelrahman Elabd, Eilam Gross, Dmitrii Kobylianskii, Runze Li, Benjamin Nachman

Sunday 23 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.plasm-ph

Interpretable statistical feature engineering for early disruption prediction in the short pulse ADITYA tokamak

Reliable early disruption prediction is critical for the safe operation and real-time control of tokamaks. However, machine learning based prediction frameworks have predominantly targeted medium and long pulse devices, with comparatively limited attention given to short pulse tokamaks where available warning time is inherently constrained. In this work, an interpretable machine learning framework is developed for feature engineering and early prediction of disruptions in the ADITYA using the initial plasma evolution information, prior to the activation of the negative converter of the ohmic transformer power supply. Statistical descriptors comprising the mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis and wavelet energy entropy are extracted from routinely available plasma diagnostics over different operation time windows. Decision tree based feature selection is employed to identify physically meaningful disruption precursors and to reduce feature dimensionality. These selected features are used to train a random forest classifier. The proposed framework achieves stable predictive performance across different analysis windows, with a maximum ROC-AUC of 0.87 for 0-35 ms and 0-40 ms windows. Comparable and in some cases improved, performance is obtained using the reduced feature set, demonstrating that the selected statistical descriptors retain the essential information required for disruption prediction. The proposed methodology provides an interpretable and computationally efficient framework for real time disruption prediction in short pulse tokamaks and establishes that carefully engineered statistical descriptors can effectively replace raw time series inputs for early disruption prediction, thereby offering a practical pathway toward real time plasma control in short pulse tokamaks similar to ADITYA and ADITYA-U.
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All authors Jyoti Agarwal, Kavit Patel, Bhaskar Chaudhury, Abhishek Sharma, Shrichand Jakhar, Manika Sharma

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from nlin.CD

Noise Effects on Ordinal Pattern Statistics via Majorization

The Bandt-Pompe permutation entropy framework, alongside the complexity-entropy causality plane, has become a standard tool for characterizing the dynamical properties of time series. However, observational noise distorts ordinal pattern probability distributions in ways that can systematically misplace time series within the causality plane, compromising dynamical classification. This effect is particularly relevant for geophysical signals, which are typically poorly and irregularly sampled, and have a low signal-to-noise level. In this work, we characterize the distortions on ordinal pattern statistics using the formalism of majorization. We provide theoretical results and propose corrective strategies that restore discriminability under realistic measurement conditions. To achieve this, we introduce methodology that allows the characterization of noisy dynamical series and further allows the quantification of observational noise without the need of a fitting procedure. Finally, we illustrate our methodology by analyzing paleomagnetic records to determine if the geological evolution of the Earth dipole is better described by a stochastic or chaotic system.
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Friday 21 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from math-ph

Chern–Simons Fluctuations and Information Geometry in Discrete Electromagnetism

We construct helicity-conditioned statistical states for a Whitney-discretized electromagnetic field on a closed oriented three-manifold. The simplicial de Rham complex provides exact discrete gauge symmetry, while the Whitney inner product separates exact, harmonic, and coexact sectors. The spatial Abelian Chern–Simons functional is gauge invariant and depends only on the coexact potential. After fixing harmonic modes, we introduce a helicity-biased Gaussian ensemble on the reduced electromagnetic phase space and derive explicit formulas for its admissible parameters, partition function, mean helicity, relative entropy, and Fisher information. The distribution uniquely minimizes relative entropy under a prescribed mean-helicity constraint. Its helicity susceptibility equals the variance of the discrete Chern–Simons functional and controls the local distinguishability of neighboring statistical states. Because magnetic helicity is generally not conserved under unconstrained Maxwell dynamics, these states represent conditioned inference rather than dynamical equilibrium.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.ao-ph

Probabilistic inference of surface parameters for Monin-Obukhov similarity theory

In simulations of atmospheric flow, the grid spacing typically exceeds the size of the roughness elements at the surface by an order of magnitude. The unresolved effects of surface morphology and roughness on the flow are represented by effective surface parameters and specified as a surface flux boundary condition, most often through a formulation based on Monin-Obukhov similarity theory (MOST). These surface parameters are known to depend on both surface and flow properties, yet they are generally estimated as deterministic quantities with no characterization of associated uncertainty. In this study, we use a Bayesian approach to infer surface parameters for MOST and quantify their uncertainties. For the aerodynamic roughness length $z_0$ inferred in isolation, a normal-normal conjugate update yields the posterior and posterior predictive distributions in closed form. We first demonstrate our method on idealized conventionally neutral boundary layers generated by large-eddy simulation, where $z_0$ is prescribed, and quantify how prior- and observation-related choices shape the inferred posterior. We then apply the method to field observations from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains observatory, from which we infer $z_0$ distributions conditioned on month, on wind direction, and on both jointly. By leveraging a prior informed by sample statistics of all near-neutral observations in the training years, we demonstrate the advantage of the Bayesian inference method for $z_0$ relative to the state-of-practice least-squares profile-fitting method in conditions of data sparsity. Predictions for unseen observations-evaluated at the posterior mean-reduce root mean squared error and mean absolute error in data-sparse wind directions, while posterior predictive distributions consistently reduce the continuous ranked probability score by approximately $20$-$30\%$.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.IM

NestyNet. IV. Laws Chosen by Nothing in Advance

Differential-equation (DE) discovery tends to break down precisely where much of physics begins. Fields are coupled, governing laws are nonlinear in the state, amplitudes, coordinates, or operators of interest, yet derivatives must remain consistent across fields, channels, and differentiation orders. NestyNet-DE addresses this via two complementary DE search strategies, both employing analytic derivatives from segmented neural surrogates: a sparse-library route linear in the outer coefficients, and a new operator-factorized route that searches directly over equation structure rather than a fixed library, recovering compositional laws the sparse route misses. The recovered laws can be strongly nonlinear in states, fields, coordinates, and their couplings. The framework also handles multi-dataset shared-support discovery, complex and vector laws, and Hamiltonian discovery from phase-space trajectories. Beyond a law's form, the same data yield its geometry, the Lie point symmetries of the recovered equation. We apply the pipeline to 30 years of daily ephemerides of $308$ main-belt asteroids and recover the reduced-Kepler hierarchy (areal law, inverse-square force, and reduced Hamiltonian), where a discovered rotational symmetry fixes the centrifugal coefficient rather than fitting it. We also present a benchmark of 57 real-valued ODEs and 26 complex-valued systems, including the Schrödinger and Dirac equations, with Maxwell's equations as a coupled vector-PDE case study. Here, discovery is not shackled to a fixed library, nor does it end at the equation. It composes laws that no dictionary anticipated, and closes the loop from data, to a law chosen by nothing in advance, to the geometry that explains and integrates it.
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All authors Rodrigo Ibata, Wassim Tenachi, Foivos Diakogiannis, Neil Ibata, Anirudh Shankar

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.IM

NestyNet. III. Symbolic Regression from Analytic Neural Surrogates

Many physical laws are simple only after the right representation, decomposition or internal coordinate has been found, but discovering that structure from data is combinatorially hard. This task is symbolic regression (SR), the search for closed-form expressions that fit data without assuming a fixed model class. Here we present NestyNet-SR. A neural surrogate with analytic derivatives is used to detect separability, recursively reducing multivariate problems to simpler neural atoms. These atoms are distilled into closed form by a tiered symbolic-search stack, whose final tier is a novel factorized symbolic search that separates structure from calibration. Composing candidate internal coordinates freely, it scores each coordinate by how well calibrated functions of it (e.g., polynomials, power laws, sinusoids) fit the data, so the constants of those calibrated maps, however deeply nested in the final expression, are fitted rather than searched. The method supports multi-dataset regression, automated feature discovery, and dimensional-analysis pruning. On the SRBench AI~Feynman benchmark, NestyNet-SR achieves exact symbolic recovery of all 120 noiseless equations, the first such result, and under noise a statistical audit certifies which structures survive. As a real-data vignette, given only the separate mass-model components of SPARC-survey galaxies, the algorithm discovers the baryonic acceleration coordinate, reproduces the established mass-to-light and acceleration scales and the non-unique form of the radial acceleration relation, and adds held-out-galaxy generalization, a calibrated symmetry abstention, and a posterior for the local slope of the law. Analytic derivatives thus provide a practical route from neural surrogates to interpretable closed-form empirical laws.
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All authors Rodrigo Ibata, Wassim Tenachi, Foivos Diakogiannis, Neil Ibata, Anirudh Shankar

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from nlin.CD

Identifying the structure of dynamical transitions in logistic map

Nonlinear dynamical systems manifest rich variety of dynamical states and transitions driven by fluctuations. To understand the pattern of fluctuations during dynamical transitions, we investigate the structural features of chaos to order transition in logistic map. We determine fluctuations as amplitude jumps and encode them onto a complex network where nodes represent amplitude levels and links represent transitions between distinct amplitude bins. We discover that global network measures identify points of period doubling, regimes of periodicity and chaos, including interior crises events. Using local network measures, we also unravel novel peculiar parabolic-shaped patterns in the orbit diagram that we show are reminiscent of the distribution of stable and unstable periodic points in the bifurcation diagram.
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All authors Aswin Balaji, Shruti Tandon, Shwetha Viswesh, Norbert Marwan, Juergen Kurths, R. I. Sujith

Thursday 20 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from nlin.CD

Noise-Induced Predictability Redistribution Across Forecast Horizons of Extreme Events in Chaotic Dynamics

Extreme events (EEs) in chaotic dynamics are rare broad excursions whose forecastability can be altered by dynamical noise. We investigate how noise changes EE occurrence and prediction skill across forecast horizons in a third-order autonomous chaotic flow. A single clean-data threshold is frozen for all realizations, broad events are defined by one maximum per excursion, and a future window W=15 is predicted from a 15-time-unit history using HistGradientBoosting with chronological data separation. As the forecast gap G between the observed history and the future event window increases, the clean Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) decreases from 0.641 at G=0 to 0.165 at G=15. Noise dependence is evaluated with ten paired realizations at eight amplitudes. The mean short-horizon score increases from 0.456 in clean data to 0.546 at sigma=0.007; the paired gain is 0.0895 (95% CI 0.0494-0.1295; Holm-adjusted p=0.0234). Noise strongly increases EE occurrence while event amplitude and width remain comparatively stable. Equalizing positive training counts across noise levels substantially attenuates the short-horizon gain, whereas strong noise reduces intermediate-horizon skill. We term this horizon-dependent, nonuniform change in forecast skill noise-induced predictability redistribution (NIPR).
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.app-ph

Acoustic Resonance Distribution for Core-Shell Scatterers

Acoustic metamaterials can exhibit unusual effective properties through mechanisms such as energy localization and resonant behavior in their constituent building blocks. Here, we investigate the internal acoustic energy of fluid core-shell spheres and map how resonances emerge from the interplay between material contrasts and shell geometry. The resulting phase diagram reveals an organized resonant landscape across distinct impedance-contrast regimes. From this structure, we obtain two compact predictive relations: one for resonance existence and another for spectral recurrence of successive peaks. Together, they enable the rapid identification of material and geometric combinations associated with targeted resonance responses. The framework is further tested against representative systems from the literature, reproducing their observed behavior. These results provide a physics-based route for screening and tailoring resonant core-shell building blocks before full-wave numerical simulations.
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All authors Naruna E. Rodrigues, Gilberto Nakamura, Odemir M. Bruno, Alexandre S. Martinez

Wednesday 19 August

Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from cond-mat.stat-mech

Statistical complexity from fluctuations in the information content

We argue that the variance of the information content ($C$), an information-theoretic quantity, can be naturally interpreted as a measure of statistical complexity. We show that $C$ satisfies widely accepted criteria for statistical complexity measures: it vanishes for both ordered and equiprobable states, while attaining maxima in intermediate regimes, typically shifted toward order. This interpretation establishes direct connections with thermodynamics and phase transitions: for systems obeying Boltzmann–Gibbs statistics, $C$ is extensive and directly proportional to energy fluctuations and heat capacity. Moreover, unlike other statistical complexity measures, it attains a maximum at continuous phase transitions, as illustrated for the two-dimensional Ising model. Applications to chaotic maps and fractional Gaussian noise further indicate that $C$ captures nontrivial dynamical structure in different classes of correlated systems.
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Data Analysis and Statistics · Cross-listed from physics.ao-ph

Coupled multiscale paleoclimate reconstruction with four-dimensional variational data assimilation

Paleoclimate archives extend climate knowledge beyond the instrumental era, registering different seasons, variables, time averages, and memory lengths. A longstanding problem is to integrate these heterogeneous sources of information within a unified methodology. Here we present a new data-assimilation framework, Last Millennium Reanalysis 4D-Var (LMR4D-Var), which reconstructs climate trajectories from these heterogeneous datasets while balancing errors in the model, observations, and initial conditions. We compare results using LMR4D-Var to assimilate proxies from PAGES2k, Temp12k, and borehole temperature profiles without treating them as instantaneous equivalents. Instrumental verification shows that LMR4D-Var achieves the highest skill compared with previous reconstructions. Borehole assimilation preserves skill against withheld annually resolved records, increases agreement between reconstructed 300–2000-m ocean heat content and independent estimates, and yields a cooler reconstructed Little Ice Age ocean. Results for Temp12k demonstrate assimilation of decadal-to-millennial records and the potential for Holocene and deeper-time applications with suitable emulators.
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All authors Zilu Meng, Gregory J. Hakim, Julien Emile-Geay, Tanaya Gondhalekar, Eric J. Steig